A new flu vaccine is now targeting the 65 and older crowd. Fluad has just received approval by UK’s National Public Health Service and is being heavily promoted, mostly through fear campaigns, towards older populations. Flu vaccines have a verifiable history of being one of the most dangerous vaccines to receive based upon official government adverse event reporting and payouts for death and injury are referenced. Can we trust the safety testing done to ensure Fluad safety?
Coming to light has been the greater picture that the majority of prior vaccine safety trials are inadequate at best and often completely untested against inert placebos. In the case of a vaccine trial, the vaccine in question being tested for safety would be compared to a harmless saline injection, otherwise referred to as a placebo.
During the safety testing for the Fluad vaccine, researchers did not use a saline/inert placebo. Instead they used another flu shot called Agriflu, a trivalent flu vaccine containing three different viral strains in it. According to Agriflu’s description, each multi-dose vial also contains the mercury derivative thimerosal leading to an injectable dose of 25 mcg. So, researchers tested the safety of a flu vaccine [Fluad] against, wait for it, another untested flu vaccine. Why would researchers abandon the scientific method of using a true placebo when a vaccine is being safety tested? As it turns out, pre-licensure studies almost always abandon the scientific method when testing vaccines for safety.
Of the 7,082 people 65 and older involved in the vaccine trial who received Fluad, 52 deaths were reported within a year after getting the vaccine. Of those who received the ‘placebo’ Agriflu vaccine, 46 deaths were reported. In short, 1 in 72 people over 65 who received one of the flu vaccines in the Fluad safety trial died. Researchers will probably say, “The sample population was older, some people just naturally die.” Is such a statement scientific? Are there any acceptable excuses for not following a proper scientific testing method when people’s lives are at stake and deaths occur?
In a recent interview, Dr. Sherri Tenpenny described the lack of proper science underpinning the Fluad safety trials in the US.
“When they did the clinical trials on Fluad in the United States, there were only a thousand healthy seniors in that trial, only a thousand, before they unleashed it on the entire geriatric population. And the only adverse events that they considered and documented as being associated with the vaccine was if they, within the first 21 days, were hospitalized or if they died. No other adverse event was considered to be significant.”
Dr Tenpenny’s admissions were strikingly similar to what was recently reported by the mainstream publication Slate.com regarding Merck’s nonscientific vaccine safety testing for its HPV vaccine Gardasil. An 8-month investigation by Slate involving more than 2,300 pages of documents through Freedom-of-Information requests from hospitals and health authorities suggested there were “…inadequacies built into Merck’s major clinical tests of Gardasil.”
Slate writes:
“To track the safety of its product, the drugmaker used a convoluted method that made objective evaluation and reporting of potential side effects impossible during all but a few weeks of its years-long trials. At all other times, individual trial investigators used their personal judgment to decide whether or not to report any medical problem as an adverse event—essentially, as a potential side effect worth evaluating further.”
Why aren't vaccines being tested against a true placebo? When vaccine safety testing is concerned, placebo’s aren’t what they seem. In nearly every case of vaccine safety testing, various combinations of what could only be considered ‘non-placebos’ were used. In fact, over the decades, scores of people around the world, often labeled ‘anti-vaxxers,’ have pointed out the blatant, nonscientific methods used to test vaccine safety. Did the industry change after continually being called out for poor research standards? Well, yes and no. Instead of adopting proper scientific testing methods by using truly inert placebos, over the past few years the vaccine industry quietly changed the word placebo in their trial data to the more accurate term comparator. Admittedly, the word comparator is a more correct term for what has been passing for ‘safety science’. However, the nonscientific foundations vaccine safety, a booming multibillion dollar vaccine industry, and public health policy rest upon cannot be remedied by rebranding. A change in terminology around fraudulent safety studies doesn’t change the fact that proper safety testing hasn’t been done. Nor does it change the fact that the public has been, and continues to be, lied to regarding the real safety of vaccines.
As more research is done into vaccine safety and the ‘scientific’ studies that purport to prove such safety, science appears to be the one thing that can’t be found. Not using proper placebos, using personal judgement to decide what serious adverse events to report, using short windows of monitoring time to look for adverse reactions is common statistical manipulation as best. What will it take for regulatory agencies and public health policies to reverse their steadfast, blind faith in the unproven safety of vaccines?
Coming to light has been the greater picture that the majority of prior vaccine safety trials are inadequate at best and often completely untested against inert placebos. In the case of a vaccine trial, the vaccine in question being tested for safety would be compared to a harmless saline injection, otherwise referred to as a placebo.
During the safety testing for the Fluad vaccine, researchers did not use a saline/inert placebo. Instead they used another flu shot called Agriflu, a trivalent flu vaccine containing three different viral strains in it. According to Agriflu’s description, each multi-dose vial also contains the mercury derivative thimerosal leading to an injectable dose of 25 mcg. So, researchers tested the safety of a flu vaccine [Fluad] against, wait for it, another untested flu vaccine. Why would researchers abandon the scientific method of using a true placebo when a vaccine is being safety tested? As it turns out, pre-licensure studies almost always abandon the scientific method when testing vaccines for safety.
Of the 7,082 people 65 and older involved in the vaccine trial who received Fluad, 52 deaths were reported within a year after getting the vaccine. Of those who received the ‘placebo’ Agriflu vaccine, 46 deaths were reported. In short, 1 in 72 people over 65 who received one of the flu vaccines in the Fluad safety trial died. Researchers will probably say, “The sample population was older, some people just naturally die.” Is such a statement scientific? Are there any acceptable excuses for not following a proper scientific testing method when people’s lives are at stake and deaths occur?
In a recent interview, Dr. Sherri Tenpenny described the lack of proper science underpinning the Fluad safety trials in the US.
“When they did the clinical trials on Fluad in the United States, there were only a thousand healthy seniors in that trial, only a thousand, before they unleashed it on the entire geriatric population. And the only adverse events that they considered and documented as being associated with the vaccine was if they, within the first 21 days, were hospitalized or if they died. No other adverse event was considered to be significant.”
Dr Tenpenny’s admissions were strikingly similar to what was recently reported by the mainstream publication Slate.com regarding Merck’s nonscientific vaccine safety testing for its HPV vaccine Gardasil. An 8-month investigation by Slate involving more than 2,300 pages of documents through Freedom-of-Information requests from hospitals and health authorities suggested there were “…inadequacies built into Merck’s major clinical tests of Gardasil.”
Slate writes:
“To track the safety of its product, the drugmaker used a convoluted method that made objective evaluation and reporting of potential side effects impossible during all but a few weeks of its years-long trials. At all other times, individual trial investigators used their personal judgment to decide whether or not to report any medical problem as an adverse event—essentially, as a potential side effect worth evaluating further.”
Why aren't vaccines being tested against a true placebo? When vaccine safety testing is concerned, placebo’s aren’t what they seem. In nearly every case of vaccine safety testing, various combinations of what could only be considered ‘non-placebos’ were used. In fact, over the decades, scores of people around the world, often labeled ‘anti-vaxxers,’ have pointed out the blatant, nonscientific methods used to test vaccine safety. Did the industry change after continually being called out for poor research standards? Well, yes and no. Instead of adopting proper scientific testing methods by using truly inert placebos, over the past few years the vaccine industry quietly changed the word placebo in their trial data to the more accurate term comparator. Admittedly, the word comparator is a more correct term for what has been passing for ‘safety science’. However, the nonscientific foundations vaccine safety, a booming multibillion dollar vaccine industry, and public health policy rest upon cannot be remedied by rebranding. A change in terminology around fraudulent safety studies doesn’t change the fact that proper safety testing hasn’t been done. Nor does it change the fact that the public has been, and continues to be, lied to regarding the real safety of vaccines.
As more research is done into vaccine safety and the ‘scientific’ studies that purport to prove such safety, science appears to be the one thing that can’t be found. Not using proper placebos, using personal judgement to decide what serious adverse events to report, using short windows of monitoring time to look for adverse reactions is common statistical manipulation as best. What will it take for regulatory agencies and public health policies to reverse their steadfast, blind faith in the unproven safety of vaccines?
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