Every day, it seems, I discover that something that was indubitably true is not true at all. Many of these discoveries are in th area of public health arena, where I depended completely on “experts” to do their jobs. Today’s topic is the flu shot, the vaccination that (I’ve been told for years) is a life-saving necessity for everyone, especially senior citizens.
Sharyl Atkisson is a 5-time Emmy Award winner and recipient of the Edward R. Murrow award for investigative reporting. She’s a NYT bestselling author, managing editor of the TV program “Full Measure. Her article is “Govt. Researchers: Flu Shots Not Effective in Elderly, After All.” Excerpt:
Over 20 years, the percentage of seniors getting flu shots increased sharply from 15% to 65%. It stands to reason that flu deaths among the elderly should have taken a dramatic dip making an “X” graph like this (refers to graphic). Instead, flu deaths among the elderly continued to climb.
It was hard to believe, so researchers at the National Institutes of Health set out to do a study adjusting for all kinds of factors that could be masking the true benefits of the shots. But no matter how they crunched the numbers, they got the same disappointing result: flu shots had not reduced deaths among the elderly.
In fact, the researchers said they could not correlate flu shots with reduced deaths in any age group.
It’s not what health officials hoped to find. NIH wouldn’t let us interview the study’s lead author. So we went to Boston and found the only co-author of the study not employed by NIH: Dr. Tom Reichert.
Dr. Reichert: “We realized we had incendiary material.”
Dr. Reichert said they thought their study would prove vaccinations helped.
Dr. Reichert: “We were trying to do something mainstream. That’s for sure.”
Sharyl: “Were you surprised?”
Dr. Reichert: “Astonished.”
Sharyl: “Did you check the data a couple of times to make sure?”
Dr. Reichert: “Well, even more than that. We’ve looked at other countries now and the same is true.”
That international study, soon to be published, finds the same poor results in Australia, France, Canada and the UK. And other new research stokes the idea that decades of promoting flu shots in seniors, and the billions spent, haven’t had the desired result. The current head of national immunizations confirms CDC is now looking at new strategies, but stops short of calling the present strategy a failure.
