Are flu shots really worth ...or NOT at all !?

Are Flu Shots Really Worth It?

Injection Rejections

http://www.douglassreport.com/dailydose/dd...dd20050308.html


Flu shots - shot in the foot

Just a few short months ago, the whole nation was in a panic, it seemed. There wasn't enough flu vaccine to go around for the upcoming winter - and in an election year, both Republicans and Democrats were pointing the finger at each other for the "crisis." The issue even came up in one of the presidential debates, when President Bush assured Americans that he was working on a deal with neighboring Canada to boost supplies of this year's vaccine.

My point, as always when it comes to vaccines, is this: They're worthless.

This time last year (Daily Dose 2/20/2004), I told you about how a study of hospitals conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed that the millions of doses of influenza vaccine injected into Americans last winter made only around a 2% difference in infection rates - not statistically significant.

And guess what? There's an even bigger study out this year that supports this exact same conclusion. According to an AP wire report, a new National Institutes of Health study suggests that administering flu shots to the elderly - supposedly the most "at-risk" demographic of Americans - hasn't saved ANY LIVES AT ALL. Ever.

That's right, despite the millions (maybe billions) of your tax dollars the government's spending every year to vaccinate the vast throngs of weary seniors who've waited in long lines on the recommendations of the government and medical establishment, the shots may very well do no good at all. The study, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, focused on three decades worth of data from the entire elderly population of the United States.

Naturally, the CDC plans no change in its guidelines on who should get flu shots, despite this research - or the results of their own studies of a year ago I mentioned earlier. They will continue to recommend an annual flu shot for those 65 and older, just as they have since the 1960s. Why would the government keep needlessly scaring seniors into getting flu shots - and keep recommending a course of prevention that doesn't work?

I can think of one reason: There's an awful lot of profit to be made by drug companies selling vaccine doses to the government. Maybe that's why rates of vaccination among that age group have soared from around 20% in 1980 to 65% in 2001. And I thought people got wiser with age…

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Other needless needles for seniors

This is why I can never seem to get behind cosmetic surgery - there's always some kind of corner-cutting going on…

According to a recent story making the rounds on the AP wire and other sources, a federal judge has granted a government-requested injunction ordering an immediate halt of sales (and a recall) on an Arizona biotech company's product - raw botulism bacteria, marketed by the company for use in place of the Botox wrinkle treatment.

While it's true that the popular cosmetic drug Botox (a temporarily paralyzing neurotoxin) is derived from the botulism microbe, it isn't the bacteria itself in raw form. It's a derivative of a protein complex of the bacteria, or something along those lines. But the company in question marketed to cosmetic surgeons a supposedly "low dose" of pure botulism bacteria as an equivalent treatment to Botox - and as a result, 4 people are now paralyzed in Florida, including one cosmetic surgeon who injected himself with the bug.

Whether they'll recover, or even live, remains to be seen.

Botox injections are the most common non-surgical cosmetic procedures in the United States, numbering more than 1.6 million a year. A great many of these are performed on senior citizens. For me, the bottom line on these "band-aid" anti-wrinkle procedures is this…

Better to be rippled than crippled.

Always "injecting" the truth,

William Campbell Douglass II, MD