CDC Admits Flu Shots Fail Half the Time

Americans have never been big fans of flu shots. During the 2009 “swine flu” influenza A pandemic, only about 40 percent of adults bothered to roll up their sleeves. ¹ Last year, flu vaccine rates were still just 47 percent for adults but pediatricians had vaccinated 75 percent of children under two years old. ²

Perhaps it is because parents are being thrown out of pediatricians’ offices if they don’t give their children every federally recommended vaccine – or maybe it is just because adults can talk about how they felt after getting vaccinated and infants and children under age two cannot.

How many times has someone told you: “The year I got a flu shot is the only year I got sick” or maybe you learned that the hard way yourself after getting vaccinated.

Doctors insist that just because we get sick with a fever, headache, body aches and a terrible cough that hangs on for weeks after getting vaccinated, it doesn’t mean the vaccine made us sick. They say it was just a “coincidence” because correlation does not equal causation. ^{3 4}

Well, that may be true some of the time, but now the CDC is admitting that flu shots don’t prevent influenza most of the time. ⁵ In fact, studies show that a history of seasonal flu shots can even make people more susceptible to getting sick with a fever, headache, body aches and a terrible cough that hangs on for weeks! ⁶ But just like with pertussis infections, a lot of people also get and transmit influenza infections without showing any symptoms at all. ^{7 8 9}

Previous Flu Shots Raised Risks for Pandemic Flu

During the 2009 swine flu pandemic, scientists in the Netherlands asked a big question: Do annual flu shots preventing natural influenza A infections in infants and young people increase their risk of illness and death when a highly pathogenic pandemic influenza strain develops and circulates? ¹⁰ The answer to that big question was “Yes” when, in 2010, Canadian health officials confirmed that school aged children and healthy young adults, who had gotten a flu shot the previous season, were at twice the risk of coming down with pandemic A swine flu in 2009 that was severe enough to require a trip to the doctor’s office. ¹¹

Then, between 2011 and 2014, researchers in Europe published a number of studies providing evidence that immune responses to natural influenza infections and vaccinations are quite different, and very much affect the quality and length of immunity. ¹²

Most People Don’t Show Flu Symptoms, Vaccinated People More Likely to Get Sick

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