Doctor Recommends Avoiding Flu Shot, Taking Vitamin D Instead
A cardiac surgeon and Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington recommends avoiding the flu shot and taking vitamin D instead. Donald Miller, MD, says “Seventy percent of doctors do not get a flu shot.”
Health officials say that every winter 5–20 percent of the population catches the flu, 200,000 people are hospitalized, and 36,000 people will die from it. The National Vital Statistics Reports compiled by the CDC show that only 1,138 deaths a year occur due to influenza alone, and more than 34,000 of the “36,000″ flu deaths are what officials estimate are “influenza-associated” pneumonic and cardiovascular deaths.
There is also a lack of evidence that young children benefit from flu shots. A systematic review of 51 studies involving 260,000 children age 6 to 23 months found no evidence that the flu vaccine is any more effective than a placebo (Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2006;1:CD004879).
A randomized trial found that the incidence of influenza in infants whose mothers had a flu shot during their pregnancy was 4%. The incidence of flu in infants whose mothers did not have a flu shot was 10%. (NEJM 2008;359:) In the study, flu shots reduced the relative risk of influenza illness in infants by a seemingly impressive 63%, yet only 6 out of 100 infants actually benefited from the shot. The other 94 received no benefit – 4 got influenza anyway – and all are at risk from being harmed by the vaccine, particularly from the mercury, aluminum, and formaldehyde in it. - Donald Miller, MD
Flu shots contain a number of substances which may have adverse effects on health, especially for children:
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- Mercury: Two-thirds of the vaccines made for the 2008–09 flu season contain full-dose thimerosal, an organomercury compound, 49% mercury by weight. It is used to disinfect the vaccine. Each of these flu shots contain 25 micrograms of mercury, a mercury content of 50,000 part per billion, 250 times more than the Environmental Protection Agency’s safety limit. Mercury is a neurotoxin, with a toxicity level 1,000 times that of lead.
- Formaldehyde, a known cancer-causing agent is used to inactivate the virus.
- Aluminum, added to promote an antibody response,is a neurotoxin that may play a role in Alzheimer’s disease.
- Other additives in the flu vaccine include:
- Triton X-100 (a detergent)
- Polysorbate 80
- carbolic acid
- ethylene glycol (antifreeze)
- gelatin
- various antibiotics such as neomycin, streptomycin, and gentamicin that can cause allergic reactions
So why does the CDC push the flu shot every year?
The CDC’s 15-member Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) makes recommendations each year on who should be vaccinated. Almost all the ACIP members who make these recommendations have financial ties to the vaccine industry.
Hmmm… Big money influencing public health policy.
The CDC put out a 7 part Recipe to increase demand for the flu vaccine:
- Influenza’s arrival coincides with immunization “season” (i.e., when people can take action)
- Dominant strain and/or initial cases of disease are:
– Associated with severe illness and/or outcomes
– Occur among people for whom influenza is not generally
perceived to cause serious complications (e.g., children,
healthy adults, healthy seniors)
– In cities and communities with significant media outlets - Medical experts and public health authorities publicly (e.g., via media) state concern and alarm (and predict dire outcomes)–and urge influenza vaccination.
- The combination of ‘2’ and ‘3’ result in: Significant media interest and attention, Framing of the flu season in terms that motivate behavior (e.g., as “very severe,” “more severe than last or past years,” “deadly”)
- Continued reports (e.g., from health officials and media) that influenza is causing severe illness and/or affecting lots of people – helping foster the perception that many people are susceptible to a bad case of influenza.
- Visible/tangible examples of the seriousness of the illness (e.g., pictures of children, families of those affected coming forward) andpeople getting vaccinated (the first to motivate, the latter to reinforce)
- References to, and discussions, of pandemic influenza
Vaccination demand, particularly among people who don’t routinely receive an annual influenza vaccination, is related to heightened concern, anxiety, and worry. For example:
- A perception or sense that many people are falling ill
- A perception or sense that many people are experiencing bad illness
- A perception or sense of vulnerability to contracting and experiencing bad illness.
- Some component of success stems from media stories and information that create motivating (i.e., high) levels of concern and anxiety about influenza.
Great… more fear selling more vaccines.
Dr. Miller’s stance on Vitamin D and health:
The U.S. government and its citizens currently spend $2,000 billion dollars ($2 trillion) on “health care,” i.e., sickness care, each year. The cost of taking a 5,000 IU supplement of vitamin D every day for a year is $22.00. The cost for 300 million Americans taking this supplement would be $6.6 billion dollars. The number and variety of diseases that vitamin D at this dose could prevent, starting with a 50 percent reduction in cancer, is mind-boggling. If everyone took 5,000 IU/day of vitamin D, the U.S. “health care” industry would shrink. It would no longer account for 16 percent of the gross domestic product.
The increased number of deaths that occur in winter, largely from pneumonia and cardiovascular diseases, are much more likely due to vitamin D deficiency than to an increased prevalence of serologically-positive influenza virus (which also results from vitamin D deficiency).
Read the full flu vaccine article at LewRockwell.com
And another doctor is against everyone getting the flu vaccine:
P.S. Due to the large number of comments accusing me of being irresponsible, I am adding this caveat: Ask your health provider (MD, Naturopath, or other professional) about flu shots, and make your decision based on that. This blog does not dispense medical advice. The point of the article is to show that there are conflicting opinions about vaccines, flu shots, and other medical treatments.
Image: NathanF at Flickr under Creative Commons License
@Jeremy: I agree that citing sources in general the best practice. If you don’t have to think twice that injecting yourself yearly with a cocktail of thousands of “dead” viruses and Mercury to stay “healthy”, based on the CDS’s ever-expanding bucket list of humans, then please help natural selection and inject yourself daily until being sick is not longer applicable for you. Also, nobody cares about your wife.
I agree that this article is reckless, incompetent, and terrible for the public health. The flu shot SAVES lives. Not just the lives of those who take it, but the lives of everyone else in the world who would be at risk from a pandemic flu. The reasoning, “evidence,” and arguments presented here are seriously flawed. There are serious documented health benefits and almost no documented health risks. The level of mercury in the shot is in excess of any *relevant* health limits, including those of the EPA. I think posting lies like this borders on criminal.
You can’t put your face and title on the top of an article making rather extreme medical claims and do as little research as you clearly did. Simply passing the buck onto the original article does not absolve you of responsibility, you offered your opinion and have helped promote and give credence to someone with pretty suspect ideas. Exactly how much of your own research did you do before you drew a line between this mans Aids denial and his vaccine denial?
Seriously, I’m glad we have these anti-vaccine weirdos in the same way I’m happy to have 911 conspiracy theorists and HIV-isn’t-related-to-AIDS promoters. They’re mostly delusional, but it’s good to have your conclusions challenged anyway. Once in a million times there may actually be something to what the outliers have to say… so we should listen.
However, this is not one of those times.
Got the flu shot this year. Will keep getting ‘em. Having the flu sucks.
W
PS. I got through the article without reading the word “autism” once? Shocking.
The WHO (World Health Organization) and EPA both recommend keeping mercury exposure to less than 30 micrograms per day. This is for methyl-mercury substances, not the ethyl-mercury substance that is in Thimerosal. Ethyl-mercury compounds are more easily excreted by the body, and the level of mercury in the bloodstream drops rapidly.
Check out these references:
http://www.fda.gov/CbER/vaccine/thimerosal.htm
http://www.rochester.edu/pr/releases/med/mercury.htm
Eat a piece of swordfish and you will have consumed almost double the amount of mercury in a flu vaccine.
I am a graduate fellow working on influenza. I do not work on vaccines, but on computational analysis of influenza evolution. The reason we need annual vaccines is because this virus evolves extremely quickly. The vaccines DO induce protective immunity, that is, when you get infected with influenza after being vaccinated your immune system will recognize the virus before it can get a foothold in your respiratory system. We can argue whether the immunogenicity is as good as it could be, but its undeniable that the vaccine primes your immune system against the virus, and that reduces the probability of getting a full-blown influenza infection after exposure.
The author of the article misquotes in the only citation mentioned: 16 infants got laboratory-confirmed influenza from their unvaccinated mothers as oppose to 6 who got influenza from their vaccinated mothers. He lists these numbers as 10 and 6. See here for the citation: content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abstract/359/15/1555
Also, a brief PubMed search for influenza and NEJM (New England Journal of Medicine, the most prestigious medical journal in the US) reveals 256 results, many of which are trials of vaccines. Here are a few that flatly contradict LewRockwell’s ideas:
content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abstract/357/14/1373
Influenza vaccine is effective at reducing influenza-related morbidity and mortality in an elderly population,
content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abstract/357/13/1280
No link between thimerosal exposure and neuropsyciatric effects - remember, many forms of mercury are not absorbed.
content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/356/7/685
Live attenuated virus versus inactivated virus vaccines in children. Live attenuated virus is more effective in children.
There are many more articles on this than these. Anybody who is interested in science or health should be familiar with pubmed. We as citizens pay for this research, but we are not educated to understand it. This allows crackpots like Lew Rockwell to influence us unduly. Rockwell is barely a physician. He is an ideologue. Some of his economic views are reasonable, but when it comes to health, he should probably leave the detailed analysis to individuals actively involved in medical research and treatment. He should stick to radical economic ideas rather than misinforming citizens with his ‘medical’ opinions.
No one can say for certain any effects man made chemistry will have. We simple don’t have generations of evidence on the flu shot, especially since it is always evolving.
What I do know is I have survived the flu many times in my life and I am not a healthy lifestyle person. I smoke, drink, do drugs, and eat garbage food all the time and I have never had a flu shot.
It’s true that every conspiracy theorist is probably going to get a few things right. Alex Jones, for instance, successfully uncovered the US military’s recent development of microwave weapons, even though he has been written off by most as a nutcase a long time ago.
The way I see it with health care is, if you look at the history of medicine, no one disputes that at some point in the past, patients were being unnecessarily harmed by their treatment. What I ask is, when did that end? And if you look at the timeline, you’ll see that it didn’t end at all. There is no point where you can say, OK, this is when western medicine stopped harming people unnecessarily, because we haven’t gotten even close to that point. In the future, we will probably look back at this point in time and view it as an uncivilized world.
Injecting a potent neurotoxin directly into the bloodstream of children is considered harmless? You gotta be kidding me. The industry is who developed this mentality, slowly and unconsciously over a long period of time, and the institutions are designed to self-preserve, so it’s not so much a conspiracy as is it simply the way things work based on the current money based economy.
This is my third year working in a hospital and so far I have not accepted the flu shot, nor have I gotten the flu. I also take Vit D supplements, live an active lifestyle, eat well, and practice good sanitary hygiene (espcially at work). And that works just fine.
Perhaps my family is blessed to visit a medical office that makes sure our vaccines are as clean as safe as possible. For example, my physician will not use a vaccine with mercury. Secondly, no one in my family seems to have ever had a bad reaction to vaccines, so I count us lucky. However, several of us have had very very bad cases of the flu. Several years ago I was so sick I seriously thought I would die. I’ve know of babies who got rushed to the hospital with the flu and I’ve known second hand babies who have died of the flu. Everyone in our family (hubby, son and I) get flu shots every year now.
Furthermore, if this is really just a conspiracy of “big medicine” then why does my insurance (and or my husbands place of work)pay for it every year? Insurance companies only pay for things that save them money overall. That means that people who don’t get flu shots, but who need medical treatment cost them money. So on one hand the insurance company wants to save money by giving you a flu shot, on the other hand, it saves them money, because you don’t get sick as a dog and need to go to the hospital!
Something else to think about: in years in which the number of vaccines are limited — they vaccinate at risk people first. My father is 79, has emphysema and could easily die from the flu, hence he also gets a flu shot every year.
Really, this entire blog network is discredited by regurgitating dangerous pseudo-science like this. The entry needs to be updated pronto with a headline clarification that the “doctor” quoted is a conspiracy nut, and that there is no scientific evidence to support his ravings.