Seasonal flu death estimates grossly overestimated

Monday, October 25, 2010 by: Jonathan Benson, staff writer
Tags: seasonal flu, death estimates, health news

(NaturalNews) Every year as flu season approaches, health authorities begin their chorus of warnings about the dangers of getting the flu. As part of their campaign to drum up support for the annual flu vaccine, it is common to hear about the 36,000 people who die every year from flu-related illness. But is this statistic even accurate? According to a recent announcement from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), no.

According to the CDC, there is no average number of people who die from the flu because the actual count varies significantly from year to year. Published in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the CDC announcement explains that the actual death count from flu-related illness has been as low as 3,300 in some years, which is far lower than the statistics used in media talking points.

The vast majority of flu-related deaths occur in people over the age of 65. Typically it is not even the flu that kills them, but other illnesses that result at some point after having the flu. But this fact has not stopped the CDC from now recommending that every person over the age of six months get a flu vaccine.

But do flu vaccines even work in the first place? According to two reviews recently published by the Cochrane Foundation, flu vaccinations are not effective at preventing the flu. In fact, they do virtually nothing to prevent the flu-related illnesses that are actually responsible for causing death primarily in the elderly.

According to Dr. Tom Jefferson from the Cochrane Vaccines Field, flu vaccines "show only modest or no effect against influenza and hospitalization from pneumonia." He goes on to say in a podcast that "we have no reliable evidence on the effects of influenza vaccines on the elderly and health care workers who work with the elderly. What we do have evidence of is widespread manipulation of conclusions and spurious notoriety of the studies."

So in summary, all the hoopla over flu deaths and the need for a flu vaccine are grounded in junk science and faulty statistics.

Sources for this story include:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/health/la-sci-...

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/288946