Vaccinating against influenza
Context
All market-approved influenza vaccines include or encode proteins (antigens) from both Influenza A and Influenza B. The specific strains of A and B included in a given year’s vaccine preparation vary from year to year based on recommendations from a WHO working group that looks at northern and southern hemisphere trends modeled based on preceding year strain monitoring data.
Implementation
The WHO recommends annual influenza vaccination to prevent influenza illness in high-risk groups. Little is known about national influenza immunization policies globally. Of 194 WHO Member States, 115 (59%) reported having a national influenza immunization policy in 2014. Among countries with a national policy, programmes target specific WHO-defined risk groups, including pregnant women (42%), young children (28%), adults with chronic illnesses (46%), the elderly (45%), and health care workers (47%). The Americas, Europe, and Western Pacific were the WHO regions that had the highest percentages of countries reporting that they had national influenza immunization policies.
Japan is the only country that has ever had the policy of controlling the toll of influenza by immunizing schoolchildren rather than the elderly. This policy gained advocates after the deadly Asian flu outbreak in 1957, became more commonly practised from 1962 through 1977, and was made mandatory from 1977 until the laws were relaxed in 1987 and ultimately revoked in 1994.
From 1962 through 1987 most Japanese schoolchildren, perhaps up to 80% in the 7 to 15 year old age group, were vaccinated against influenza; after 1994, this percentage fell to very low levels. Excess mortality (death rates) from pneumonia, influenza and all-causes in Japan were highly correlated with children's vaccination rates. By comparison, these rates remained fairly constant over the same time period in other countries. With the growing implementation of the vaccination programme in Japan, excess mortality rates dropped over three-fold those in comparable countries. It is estimated that the children's vaccination programme prevented between 37,000 and 49,000 deaths per year in Japan, or 1 (adult) death for every 420 child vaccinated. As children's vaccination rates fell after 1987, the excess mortality rates for each of the parameters evaluated increased. This seemingly effective law was revoked because there were sensationalized reports of lawsuits alleging adverse side effects of vaccination, and the public lost confidence in the programme.
A similar effect was found during the 1968-9 "Hong Kong Flu" outbreak in Tecumseh, Michigan, USA when that community achieved a vaccination rate of 85% of its schoolchildren. The data, analysed and published in 1970, showed that the adult rate of influenza was one-third of that in a neighbouring region where children remained unvaccinated.
Claim
“Leaky vaccine” is industry jargon for partially effective products intended to prevent infection, replication, spread and disease caused by what you are “vaccinating” against. The current gold standard for “effectiveness” in influenza “vaccines” is natural infection. And natural infection is not completely effective. Otherwise, we would all get one influenza A infection and one influenza B infection when we are children, and that would confer lifelong protection against all influenza viruses. All influenza vaccines to date are imperfect because we have not learned how to make a “vaccine” that is sterilizing and works better than natural infection.
Influenza virus continues to circulate in humans (and birds, and other animals) because it is partially able to evade immune responses generated by prior infections in these animals. And it continually evolves (“drifts and shifts”) to better evade those responses. The less effective a “vaccine” product is at preventing infection and replication of an infectious pathogen, the more likely widespread dosing with that product will select for pathogens that are more ‘vaccine resistant”. You cannot vaccinate”your way out of an outbreak of influenza with an imperfect vaccine; and to try will only make matters worse. This is a fundamental truth.
Counter-claim
Observational studies substantially overestimate influenza vaccination benefit. Most countries do not recommend population-wide annual influenza vaccination. Annual influenza vaccination can make you more susceptible to influenza-like illness. Increasing annual influenza vaccination of the elderly is associated with increased influenza-related death in the elderly. This is not what we are told, and it calls into question whether we are wasting a lot of money and effort (and propaganda) to dose the entire population with injectable products that have risks. Whatever those risks are, how serious, how frequent, in what age and risk factor groups we do not really know because this is (basically) a forbidden topic of inquiry.