«Influenza is RARE»

… The US authorities knew that fraud was essentially taking place

… In the mid-1990s, as the Cochrane Collaboration was starting

… we wrote protocols and published reviews on the effects (effectiveness and harms)

of influenza vaccines (all types of inactivated and live attenuated)

… looked only at randomised controlled trials

… until we realised there was no point in going on

… 3 of the reviews were stabilised (no more updates)

… The fourth review is currently being updated

1. Demicheli V, Jefferson T, et al. Vaccines for preventing influenza in healthy adults. 2018
2. Jefferson T, Rivetti et al. Vaccines for preventing influenza in healthy children. 2018
3. Demicheli V, Jefferson T et al. Vaccines for preventing influenza in the elderly. 2018
4. Thomas RE, Jefferson T, et al. Influenza vaccination for healthcare workers who care for people aged 60 or older living in long-term care institutions.

… They include data from 105 (real) placebo-controlled trials

… involving over 100,000 individuals

… In the healthy adult’s review, the placebo arm picked up 465 cases out of 18,593 participants

… So, of the folks with symptoms, 97.5% were not caused by influenza

… The trials spanned 50 years of data

… the highs, the lows, and the maybes and even 2 influenza pandemics

… The placebo arm incidence is essential

… Complications were very rare

… So influenza is rare,

… loads more agents causing the same signs, symptoms are lumped under the appalling term “flu,”

… inactivated vaccines do not stand a chance against a relatively rare moving target like influenza