While on the subject of medical newsletters – you can see that this is a Sunday clear-out of my email in-box. Two posts from Dr John Briffa (another oasis of good sense in a sometimes non-sensical medical world).
The ‘flu vaccine. He had noted, as have I, the ‘roll up, roll up for your vaccine’ banners flapping outside our local GP practice. As anyone who has read the material on the FoodsMatter site on vaccinations will know, I am not a great vaccine enthusiast. Yes, I do believe that vaccination has a place in medical care, but I also believe that it is grossly overused, over hyped and under-safety tested. Certainly, nothing that I have read about the ‘flu vaccine would persuade me otherwise. Dr Briffa is certainly of that opinion. And if you want to know why take a look at his post of 27th October and his rather longer and more detailed post on 25th November last year.
And if you are wondering why he is so dubious about government inspired ‘advice’ you might also want to read his post earlier this month about ‘conflicts of interest amongst those setting diabetes and cholesterol guidelines’. If you wish to dig deeper into the unreliability of medical ‘research findings’, read the FoodsMatter report of the BSEM conference last March: ‘A tablet a day keeps the patient at bay: the health hazards of prevention – vaccinations and pharmacoprophylaxis.’
PS Continuing my clear out of my in-box I found a note of two other sites I had looked at with reference to the ‘flu vaccine.
One was a link to the ‘Ingredients of Vaccines – Fact Sheet‘ on the website of the US Centers of Disease control and Prevention. Under ‘Additional Facts’ it lists some of the ‘common substances’ to be found in vaccines. This is a pretty scary list if you are thinking of it being injected into an adult; a great deal more scary when you think of it being injected into week-old or, in the US, even day-old babies….
The second was to a site quoting a Dr Hugh Fudenberg, the eminent, if now elderly director of the Neuro Immuno Therapeutics Research Foundation who claimed, as far back as 1997, that his research on flu vaccinations between 1970 and 1980 showed that, thanks to the mercury and aluminium to be found in all flu vaccines, if a person had five consecutive shots during that time, their chance of developing Alzheimers was 10 times greater than if they had had one, two or no shots.
PPS More on vaccines… Yet further down my ‘in-box’ were two more vaccine related links:
One to a WorldNetDaily article from the beginning of October over the controversy unleashed by Michelle Bachmann’s questioning the policy of forcing all teenage girls to be vaccinated against the HPV virus.
The other was to a 2007 review of Scary Medicine; exposing the dark side of vaccines (from the same publishers).
PPPS 31st October.
I have just been reading a report in the pharmaceutical industry magazine, PharmaPro, on the decision of the US Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices’ to recommend Gardasil, Merck’s vaccine against the HPV virus, for boys. Note, conspiracy theorists, that it is only Merck’s vaccine that is being recommended (at $130 a shot) rather than the other vaccine that is available.
Given that this report is in a pharma industry magazine, its lack of enthusiasm for the vaccine, its efficacy and its popularity is quite striking. Let us hope that boys’ parents prove as resistant to the ‘recommendation’ as girls’ parents have been…