Many of you are confused about flu vaccines. Let's get this done with.
Flu vaccines (inactivated vaccines in general) give you strong antibody responses.
Natural infections give T cell immunity. This gives you cross protection to other flu strains(CD8 immunity). They lower viral shedding by 2/3.
To spell this out: you are protected from other strains, and you confer herd immunity to the population. Getting natural infection is a population affect. You can thank the people who don't get the flu vaccine for creating herd immunity year after year.
However, if you get a flu vaccine you get OAS - your body remembers how to respond to the flu from that shot. Meaning, you are now "in the program". You don't have cross immunity, you will shed the virus. Antibody responses don't create non-spreading asymptomatics! The program has f'd you up, and you will need the vaccine the next year.
Ironically, it is the vaccinated person who is at risk of pandemics because they don't have cross immunity.
By analogy, you can create a strong secure operating system, or you can buy virus protection year after year. Guess which one old Gates likes? He's smarter than the average joe and conniving.
Everything you need to know to question the entire paradigm is in this post. If you go into the literature you will find this all has evidence. The information is all out there.
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Numbers are needed to estimate these effects. And your post has NO NUMBERS.
Here is a sophisticated analysis, which I think includes all of your speculative "bad effects" of vaccines. Flu vaccination still wins (not by as much as would be the case given a naive analysis).
https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/170/5/650/102527
Method:
To differentiate vaccine effects from bias, we traced the vaccination-mortality association day by day—before, during, and after flu season—at Kaiser Permanente in Northern California. The usual strategy for minimizing bias is to seek good measures of potential confounders and then adjust for them. However, usually it is not feasible to track weekly changes in frailty and function as they attenuate the propensity to obtain flu shots near the end of life.
Our alternative strategy was to focus on a “difference in differences” (this term and general approach are often used by economists (16)). If the flu vaccine really does prevent deaths, then in a large population there should be a detectable difference between 2 differences: 1) the difference in the odds of prior vaccination between decedents and survivors that is observed on days when flu is circulating and 2) the difference in the odds of prior vaccination between decedents and survivors that would be expected on the same calendar dates if flu were not circulating. To examine such a difference in differences (or the corresponding ratio of odds ratios), we fitted a logistic regression model with a novel case-centered specification.
Our goals were to: 1) examine the propensity to obtain a flu shot in relation to predictors of mortality, 2) estimate the effect of flu shots on mortality, and 3) present and discuss case-centered logistic regression.
Results:
We found that flu shots reduced all-cause mortality among elderly Kaiser Permanente members by 4.6% during 9 laboratory-defined flu seasons in Northern California. Other researchers have reported that flu shots reduce mortality by much greater amounts. In a meta-analysis of results from 20 cohort and case-control studies, Voordouw et al. (6) found that flu shots reduce winter deaths by 50%, on average; and in a more recent study, Nichol et al. (19) reported a 48% reduction in all-cause mortality among the elderly during flu season. However, Simonsen et al. (11, 12, 20) found that excess mortality attributable to influenza has only been 5%–10% on average during flu seasons in the past several decades. They argued that flu shots could not possibly have prevented more deaths than the 5%–10% of deaths that were flu-related (11–13). Our estimate of excess mortality during flu season was 7.8%, which is consistent with Simonsen et al.’s nationwide estimate but lower than estimates made by others (21–23).
This excess mortality of 7.8% is what we found in a population with over 60% vaccine coverage. Our findings suggest that had none of the elderly been vaccinated, excess mortality during flu season would have averaged about 9.8%. We infer that our 4.6% VE estimate amounts to a 47% reduction (4.6/9.8 = 47%) in the number of flu-attributable deaths that would have occurred had none of the elderly been vaccinated.
Best wishes,
Don't forget to get your Flu jab!
THH
