VACCINE STUDY: Influenza vaccines only prevent the flu in 1.5 out of 100 adults (not 60% as you've been told)

(NaturalNews) A new scientific study published in The Lancet reveals that influenza vaccines only prevent influenza in 1.5 out of every 100 adults who are injected with the flu vaccine. Yet, predictably, this report is being touted by the quack science community, the vaccine-pushing CDC and the scientifically-inept mainstream media as proof that "flu vaccines are 60% effective!"

This absurd claim was repeated across the mainstream media over the past few days, with all sorts of sloppy reporting that didn't even bother to read the study itself (as usual).

NaturalNews continues to earn a reputation for actually READING these "scientific" studies and then reporting what they really reveal, not what some vaccine-pushing CDC bureaucrat wants them to say. So we purchased the PDF file from The Lancet and read this study to get the real story.

The "60% effectiveness" claim is a total lie - here's why

What we found is that the "60% effectiveness" claim is utterly absurd and highly misleading. For starters, most people think that "60% effectiveness" means that for every 100 people injected with the flu shot, 60 of them won't get the flu!

Thus, the "60% effectiveness" claim implies that getting a flu shot has about a 6 in 10 chance of preventing you from getting the flu.

This is utterly false.

In reality -- and this is spelled out right in Figure 2 of the study itself, which is entitled, "Efficacy and effectiveness of influenza vaccines: a systematic review and meta-analysis" -- only about 2.7 in 100 adults get the flu in the first place!

See the abstract at:
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/art...

Flu vaccine stops influenza in only 1.5 out of 100 adults who get the shots

Let's start with the actual numbers from the study.

The "control group" of adults consisted of 13,095 non-vaccinated adults who were monitored to see if they caught influenza. Over 97% of them did not. Only 357 of them caught influenza, which means only 2.7% of these adults caught the flu in the first place.

The "treatment group" consisted of adults who were vaccinated with a trivalent inactivated influenza vaccine. Out of this group, according to the study, only 1.2% did not catch the flu.

The difference between these two groups is 1.5 people out of 100.

So even if you believe this study, and even if you believe all the pro-vaccine hype behind it, the truly "scientific" conclusion from this is rather astonishing:

Flu vaccines only prevent the flu in 1.5 out of every 100 adults injected with the vaccine!

Note that this is very, very close to my own analysis of the effectiveness vaccines as I wrote back in September of 2010 in an article entitled, Evidence-based vaccinations: A scientific look at the missing science behind flu season vaccines (http://www.naturalnews.com/029641_vaccines_j...)

In that article, I proclaimed that flu vaccines "don't work on 99 out of 100 people." Apparently, if you believe the new study, I was off by 0.5 people out of 100 (at least in adults, see below for more discussion of effectiveness on children).

So where does the media get "60% effective?"

This is called "massaging the numbers," and it's an old statistical trick that the vaccine industry (and the pharmaceutical industry) uses over and over again to trick people into thinking their useless drugs actually work.

First, you take the 2.73% in the control group who got the flu, and you divide that into the 1.18% in the treatment group who got the flu. This gives you 0.43.

You can then say that 0.43 is "43% of 2.73," and claim that the vaccine therefore results in a "57% decrease" in influenza infections. This then becomes a "57% effectiveness rate" claim.

The overall "60% effectiveness" being claimed from this study comes from adding additional data about vaccine efficacy for children, which returned higher numbers than adults (see below). There were other problems with the data for children, however, including one study that showed an increase in influenza rates in the second year after the flu shot.

So when the media (or your doctor, or pharmacist, or CDC official) says these vaccines are "60% effective," what they really mean is that you would have to inject 100 adults to avoid the flu in just 1.5 of them.

Or, put another way, flu vaccines do nothing in 98.5% of adults.

But you've probably already noticed that the mainstream media won't dare print this statistical revelation. They would much rather mislead everybody into the utterly false and ridiculous belief that flu vaccines are "60% effective," whatever that means.

How to lie with statistics

This little statistical lying technique is very popular in the cancer industry, too, where these "relative numbers" are used to lie about all sorts of drugs.

You may have heard, for example, that a breast cancer drug is "50% effective at preventing breast cancer!"

But what does that really mean? It could mean that 2 women out of 100 got breast cancer in the control group, and only 1 woman out of 100 got it in the treatment group. Thus, the drug is only shown to work on 1 out of 100 women.

But since 1 is 50% of 2, they will spin the store and claim a "50% breast cancer prevention rate!" And most consumers will buy into this because they don't understand how the medical industry lies with these statistics. So they will think to themselves, "Wow, if I take this medication, there is a 50% chance this will prevent breast cancer for me!"

And yet that's utterly false. In fact, there is only a 1% chance it will prevent breast cancer for you, according to the study.

Minimizing side effects with yet more statistical lies

At the same time the vaccine and drug industries are lying with relative statistics to make you think their drugs really work (even when they don't), they will also use absolute statistics to try to minimize any perception of side effects.

In the fictional example given above for a breast cancer drug, let's suppose the drug prevented breast cancer in 1 out of 100 women, but while doing that, it caused kidney failure in 4 out of 100 women who take it. The manufacturer of the drug would spin all this and say something like the following:

"This amazing new drug has a 50% efficacy rate! But it only causes side effects in 4%!"

You see how this game is played? So they make the benefits look huge and the side effects look small. But in reality -- scientifically speaking -- you are 400% more likely to be injured by the drug than helped by it! (Or 4 times more likely, which is the same thing stated differently.)

How many people are harmed by influenza vaccines?

Much the same is true with vaccines. In this influenza vaccine study just published in The Lancet, it shows that you have to inject 100 adults to avoid influenza in just 1.5 adults. But what they don't tell you is the side effect rate in all 100 adults!

It's very likely that upon injecting 100 adults with vaccines containing chemical adjuvants (inflammatory chemicals used to make flu vaccines "work" better), you might get 7.5 cases of long-term neurological side effects such as dementia or Alzheimer's. This is an estimate, by the way, used here to illustrate the statistics involved.

So for every 100 adults you injected with this flu vaccine, you prevent the flu in 1.5 of them, but you cause a neurological disorder in 7.5 of them! This means you are 500% more likely to be harmed by the flu vaccine than helped by it. (A theoretical example only. This study did not contain statistics on the harm of vaccines.)

Much the same is true with mammograms, by the way, which harm 10 women for every 1 woman they actually help (http://www.naturalnews.com/020829.html).

Chemotherapy is also a similar story. Sure, chemotherapy may "shrink tumors" in 80% of those who receive it, but shrinking tumors does not prevent death. And in reality, chemotherapy eventually kills most of those who receive it. Many of those people who describe themselves as "cancer survivors" are, for the most part, actually "chemo survivors."

Good news for children?

If there's any "good news" in this study, it's that the data show vaccines to be considerably more effective on children than on adults. According to the actual data (from Figure 2 of the study itself), influenza vaccines are effective at preventing influenza infections in 12 out of 100 children.

So the best result of the study (which still has many problems, see below) is that the vaccines work on 12% of children who are injected. But again, this data is almost certainly largely falsified in favor of the vaccine industry, as explained below. It also completely ignores the vaccine / autism link, which is provably quite real and yet has been politically and financially swept under the rug by the criminal vaccine industry (which relies on scientific lies to stay in business).

Guess who funded this study?

This study was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the very same non-profit that gives grant money to Wikipedia (which has an obvious pro-vaccine slant), and is staffed by pharma loyalists.

For example, the Vice President for Human Resources and Program Management at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is none other than Gail Pesyna, a former DuPont executive (DuPont is second in the world in GMO biotech activities, just behind Monsanto) with special expertise in pharmaceuticals and medical diagnostics. (http://www.sloan.org/bio/item/10)

The Alred P. Sloan Foundation also gave a $650,000 grant to fund the creation of a film called "Shots in the Dark: The Wayward Search for an AIDS Vaccine," (http://www.sloan.org/assets/files/annual_rep...) which features a pro-vaccine slant that focuses on the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, an AIDS-centric front group for Big Pharma which was founded by none other than the Rockefeller Foundation (http://www.vppartners.org/sites/default/file...).

Seven significant credibility problems with this Lancet study

Beyond all the points already mentioned above, this study suffers from at least seven significant problems that any honest journalist should have pointed out:

Problem #1) The "control" group was often given a vaccine, too

In many of the studies used in this meta analysis, the "control" groups were given so-called "insert" vaccines which may have contained chemical adjuvants and other additives but not attenuated viruses. Why does this matter? Because the adjuvants can cause immune system disorders, thereby making the control group more susceptible to influenza infections and distorting the data in favor of vaccines. The "control" group, in other words, wasn't really a proper control group in many studies.

Problem #2) Flu vaccines are NEVER tested against non-vaccinated healthy children

It's the most horrifying thought of all for the vaccine industry: Testing healthy, non-vaccinated children against vaccinated children. It's no surprise, therefore, that flu shots were simply not tested against "never vaccinated" children who have avoided flu shots for their entire lives. That would be a real test, huh? But of course you will never see that test conducted because it would make flu shots look laughably useless by comparison.

Problem #3) Influenza vaccines were not tested against vitamin D

Vitamin D prevents influenza at a rate that is 8 times more effective than flu shots (http://www.naturalnews.com/029760_vitamin_D_...). Read the article to see the actual "absolute" numbers in this study.

Problem #4) There is no observation of long-term health effects of vaccines

Vaccines are considered "effective" if they merely prevent the flu. But what if they also cause a 50% increase in Alzheimer's two decades later? Is that still a "success?" If you're a drug manufacturer it is, because you can make money on the vaccine and then later on the Alzheimer's pills, too. That's probably why neither the CDC nor the FDA ever conducts long-term testing of influenza vaccines. They simply have no willingness whatsoever to observe and record the actual long-term results of vaccines.

Problem #5) 99.5% of eligible studies were excluded from this meta-analysis

There were 5,707 potentially eligible studied identified for this meta-analysis study. A whopping 99.5% of those studies were excluded for one reason or another, leaving only 28 studies that were "selected" for inclusion. Give that this study was published in a pro-vaccine medical journal, and authored by researchers who likely have financial ties to the vaccine industry, it is very difficult to imagine that this selection of 28 studies was not in some way slanted to favor vaccine efficacy.

Remember: Scientific fraud isn't the exception in modern medicine; it is the rule. Most of the "science" you read in today's medical journals is really just corporate-funded quackery dressed up in the language of science.

Problem #6) Authors of the studies included in this meta-analysis almost certainly have financial ties to vaccine manufacturers

I haven't had time to follow the money ties for each individual study and author included in this meta analysis, but I'm willing to publicly and openly bet you large sums of money that at least some of these study authors have financial ties to the vaccine industry (drug makers). The corruption, financial influence and outright bribery is so pervasive in "scientific" circles today that you can hardly find a published author writing about vaccines who hasn't been in some way financially influenced (or outright bought out) by the vaccine industry itself. It would be a fascinating follow-up study to explore and reveal all these financial ties. But don't expect the medical journals to print that article, of course. They'd rather not reveal what happens when you follow the money.

Problem #7) The Lancet is, itself, a pro-vaccine propaganda mouthpiece funded by the vaccine industry!

Need we point out the obvious? Trusting The Lancet to report on the effectiveness of vaccines is sort of like asking the Pentagon to report on the effectiveness of cruise missiles. Does anyone really think we're going to get a truthful report from a medical journal that depends on vaccine company revenues for its very existence?

That's a lot like listening to big government tell you how great government is for protecting your rights. Or listening to the Federal Reserve tell you why the Fed is so good for the U.S. economy. You might as well just ask the Devil whether you should be good or evil, eh?

Just for fun, let's conduct a thought experiment and suppose that The Lancet actually reported the truth, and that this study was conducted with total honesty and perfect scientific integrity. Do you realize that even if you believe all this, the study concludes that flu vaccines only prevent the flu in 1.5 out of 100 adults?

Or to put it another way, even when pro-vaccine medical journals publish pro-vaccine studies paid for by pro-vaccine non-profit groups, the very best data they can manage to contort into existence only shows flu vaccines preventing influenza in 1.5 out of 100 adults.

Gee, imagine the results if all these studies were independent reviews with no financial ties to Big Pharma! Do you think the results would be even worse? You bet they would. They would probably show a negative efficacy rate, meaning that flu shots actually cause more cases of influenza to appear. That's the far more likely reality of the situation.

Flu shots, you see, actually cause the flu in some people. That's why the people who get sick with the flu every winter are largely the very same people who got flu shots! (Just ask 'em yourself this coming winter, and you'll see.)

What the public believes

Thanks to the outright lies of the CDC, the flu shot propaganda of retail pharmacies, and the quack science published in conventional medical journals, most people today falsely believe that flu shots are "70 to 90 percent effective." This is the official propaganda on the effectiveness of vaccines.

It is so pervasive that when this new study came out reporting vaccines to be "only" 60% effective, some mainstream media outlets actually published articles with headlines like, "Vaccines don't work as well as you might have thought." These headlines were followed up with explanations like "Even though we all thought vaccines were up to 90% effective, it turns out they are only 60% effective!"

I hate to break it to 'em all, but the truth is that flu shots, even in the best case the industry can come up with, really only prevent the flu in 1.5 out of 100 adults.

Or, put another way, when you see 100 adults lined up at a pharmacy waiting to receive their coveted flu shots, nearly 99 out of those 100 are not only wasting their time (and money), but may actually be subjecting themselves to long-term neurological damage as a result of being injected with flu shot chemical adjuvants.

Outright fraudulent marketing

Given their 1.5% effectiveness among adults, the marketing of flu shots is one of the most outrageous examples of fraudulent marketing ever witnessed in modern society. Can you imagine a car company selling a car that only worked 1.5% of the time? Or a computer company selling a computer that only worked 1.5% of the time? They would be indicted for fraud by the FTC!

So why does the vaccine industry get away with marketing its flu shots that even the most desperately pro-vaccine statistical analysis reveals only works on 1.5 out of 100 adults?

It's truly astonishing. This puts flu shots in roughly the same efficacy category as rubbing a rabbit's foot or wishing really hard. That this is what passes as "science" today is so snortingly laughable that it makes your ribs hurt.

That so many adults today buy into this total marketing fraud is a powerful commentary on the gullibility of the population and the power of TV-driven news propaganda. Apparently, actually getting people to buy something totally useless that might actually harm them (or kill them) isn't difficult these days. Just shroud it all under "science" jargon and offer prizes to the pharmacy workers who strong-arm the most customers to get injected. And it works!

The real story on flu shots that you probably don't want to know

Want to know the real story on what flu shots are for? They aren't for halting the flu. We've already established that. They hardly work at all, even if you believe the "science" on that.

So what are flu shots really for?

You won't like this answer, but I'll tell you what I now believe to be true: The purpose of flu shots is to "soft kill" the global population. Vaccines are population control technologies, as openly admitted by Bill Gates (http://www.naturalnews.com/029911_vaccines_B...) and they are so cleverly packaged under the fabricated "public health" message that even those who administer vaccines have no idea they are actually engaged in the reduction of human population through vaccine-induced infertility and genetic mutations.

Vaccines ultimately have but one purpose: To permanently alter the human gene pool and "weed out" those humans who are stupid enough to fall for vaccine propaganda.

And for that nefarious purpose, they probably are 60% effective after all.

Also worth reading:
Flu Vaccines -- The Mainstream Admits, We Want an Epidemic!
http://liamscheff.com/2011/10/flu-vaccines-t...