So What About Vaccines?
The pooled effect in those healthy adults, aged 18 to 65, is reported as 57%, which means the vaccine roughly halves your chances of getting flu. What is well known about placebo effects can account for most of that 57% effect. If you know you’ve had a shot for the flu you think you’re invincible. But since the chance of getting flu in that age group was less than 3% to begin with, that’s really only about a 11/2 percent reduction. Rounding the figures off, if you’re a healthy adult, the flu vaccine will reduce your risk of actually getting the flu from 1 in 36 to 1 in 83. These are figures that are not offered in any of these studies.
Popular adjuvants include the antibiotic gentamicin (too much of which can make you deaf), aluminum compounds (which probably contribute to Alzheimer’s and other neurological diseases) (2), and the mercury antiseptic, thiomersal/thimerosal (long known to be toxic and recently suspected in autism) – after all, they have to be toxic to work as adjuvants. Fluarix, one of the main brands of flu vaccine in the USA and UK, is stated by the manufacturers to contain both gentamicin and thimerosal.
We also used to think that flu vaccine prevented deaths from flu to a significant extent, even if it didn’t prevent overt infection – until we realized there was a major artifact at work. This is known as the healthy vaccine recipient effect, and the clue is in the name; a frail elderly person is much less likely to get down to their GP to have the vaccine than is a fit elderly person, who by the way is more likely to eat and live well, take vitamins and so on, and so has better resistance to viruses anyway.
Tamiflu
So Tamiflu, which governments were stockpiling and then handing out like candy in the last big flu outbreak, may already be on the fast track past its Sell By date. We’ve been here before, with overuse of antibiotics leading to seriously resistant hospital bugs like MRSA. But that took decades. We’ve managed to squander this resource much faster, and it shows that we live on a small planet – and there’s nowhere left to hide our waste. Everywhere is our doorstep now.
The study found this to be true up to a vitamin D blood level over 100 nmol/L, which we used to think was excessive. But nowadays we don’t; the D*Action ( http://www.grassrootshealth.org/daction/index.php ) group located in San Diego have shown that you need to get even higher, above 125 nmol/L, in order to minimize your risk of developing most cancers, multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune diseases (7). Chances are the same applies to flu and chest infections. The problem is finding people with that high a vitamin D level to study them; D*Action found that it takes 9,600 IU per day of vitamin D by mouth to reliably get people above 100nmol/L (specifically, to get 97.5% of people there).
In the new UK study those with the highest vitamin D level – over 100 nmol/L – had about 50% the risk of getting respiratory infections of those with the lowest level – below 25nmol/L, which is truly deficient. All the subjects were Caucasians living in the UK, and you might expect that fair-skinned people would have a higher level of vitamin D, but this turns out not to be so – according to a 2009 study, again in the UK (8), Caucasian women have a slightly worse level of vitamin D than darker-skinned ones – no doubt because they heed the health warnings about skin cancer (now that’s a story for another time). They didn’t ask whether the subjects took any supplements, which could have made an even greater difference; a previous study in African-American women (9) found that a supplement of 800 IU per day of vitamin D reduced, and 2000 IU effectively wiped out, the risk of winter flu (see the chart below).
Vaccines are a valuable asset and we shouldn’t squander them the way we did antibiotics. You’re not going to turn down rabies vaccine if you need it. But, equally, why ignore a gift of nature such as vitamin D?
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