Flu vaccine efficacy estimates are meaningless.
They all employ test-negative designs which spew out irrelevant data.
All major nations push the annual flu jab. Like many of you, I now regard this as a complete scam. To be frank, the signs of that were always there: after all, this is a product to which they apply this win-win logic:
After a “light flu season” they say “great, flu jab worked”
After a “heavy flu season”, they shrug and say “darn, we predicted the wrong strain”
If anyone reading this hasn’t worked out by now that this is a bullshit story, they are beyond help.
The other reasons why the flu jab story is BS are:
The idea that there is a one-to-one relationship between an individual pathogen and an individual case of “chest infection” is complete nonsense.
When bronchial lavage specimens have been tested for pathogens, it is more often that none or multiple pathogens are identifiable.
The idea that nasopharangeal1 swabs (data from which support the entire paradigm) are of any relevance in diagnosing serious respiratory infections is not supportable.
Hundreds of pathogens have been found to be associated with respiratory illnesses.
So the whole idea that a vaccine against one or a few such pathogens (even if it worked - for which there is zero convincing evidence) could significantly positively impact these numbers is tripe.
“Flu admission” numbers are a vague and malleable concept anyway, because of the above.
Estimates of flu jab efficacy are in any case seriously flawed.
Why do I say the above about estimates of flu jab efficacy?
The official estimates for the last “flu season” in the UK can be found in this paper:
The abstract reads as follows:
ABSTRACT
Background
We report 2023/2024 season interim influenza vaccine effectiveness for three studies, namely, primary care in Great Britain, hospital settings in Scotland and hospital settings in England.
Methods
A test negative design was used to estimate vaccine effectiveness.
Results
Estimated vaccine effectiveness against all influenzas ranged from 63% (95% confidence interval 46 to 75%) to 65% (41 to 79%) among children aged 2–17, from 36% (20 to 49%) to 55% (43 to 65%) among adults 18–64 and from 40% (29 to 50%) to 55% (32 to 70%) among adults aged 65 and over.
Conclusions
During a period of co-circulation of influenza A(H1N1) and A(H3N2) in the United Kingdom, evidence for effectiveness of the influenza vaccine in both children and adults was found.
Test negative designs
You will note that the methodology employed was a test-negative design (TND) - this is not a randomised trial of the treatment vs placebo.
This article provides a good summary of TNDs.
Broadly-speaking, the design works as follows:
Patients seeking medical attention for the target disease at selected locations are enrolled.
They are swabbed and tested for the target disease.
Vaccine efficacy is estimated by comparing the vaccination status of patients who tested positive (for the target condition) with those who tested negative.
This is a highly flawed methodology for several reasons, as outlined in several papers2. In brief, a non-exhaustive list of the issues includes:
There are questions over the generalisability of the results (based on a small subset of those seeking medical attention from their GP ) to the entire population3
The results are extremely susceptible to poor specificity and sensitivity of the underlying test.
There are question marks over relevance - the patients are those presenting with an ILI (influenza-like illness) - and what the relevance of any results are for the prevention of serious illness seems obscure.
The results are based on a subpopulation of those who seek medical attention so cannot say anything about absolute risk reduction from the vaccines, only relative risk reduction (and even then, subject to the other issues described herein).
There are potential problems from confounding by health and healthcare-seeking behaviour (HSBs) - ie the vaccinated could seek attention more or less frequently than the unvaccinated.
Either consciously or otherwise, the doctor may institute different testing practices for vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals.
If the vaccine under study attenuates symptoms of infection, this could bias the results4.
If the vaccine increases the chance of becoming unwell with any other illness which does NOT test positive for the target disease, this technique will totally miss it. In other words, TNDs measure (badly) one specific thing, they cannot detect “off-target” effects so cannot say anything about effects on “all-cause” morbidity or mortality.5
Taken all together, it seems that data generated using this methodology is of questionable6 accuracy or relevance in the real world, certainly as far as reducing the risk of serious illness.
As Meester and Bonte concluded in The test-negative design: Opportunities, limitations and biases:
Westreich and Hudgens in their paper Invited Commentary: Beware the Test-Negative Design conclude:
Don’t be fooled by the polite understated language of academia - this is actually a scathing attack on the widespread use of this flawed methodology.
A few concluding remarks on the rationale behind flu jabs.
The assumption that an intramuscular injection of anything can augment human immunity - especially for illnesses for which the relevant immune mechanisms reside primarily in the respiratory mucosa - is, in any case, totally flawed.
Even if there was some beneficial effect versus one of a few pathogens for one season, there are almost certainly adverse effects on the longer-term development of flexible immunity.
The effects of this process repeated year after year seem to me to have potential to be seriously harmful. In this respect, it must be noted that whilst in the UK the flu jab has always been treated with some ambivalence, flu shot mandates are exremely prevalent in the USA, especially in healthcare settings.
(my co-author on several papers) has written and tweeted extensively on the topic of flu shots, suggesting that one objective of the Covid operation was to off-ramp the old flu shot technology. Some theories as to the mechanisms by which these shots are harmful have been described on X by this account which is well worth a follow.nose and throat.
This is actually an issue which plagues all clinical trials, but is no less important to point out as a result.
Of course, it could be argued that that is what they are supposed to do. However, in my view, the type of symptoms which people suffer from which cause them to seek GP advice are actually part of an evolved immune response which is associated with the development of lasting immunity against threats in the environment. It cannot be said that suppressing them is (necessarily) net beneficial longer-term.
This propensity for the healthcare-industrial complex to promote its wares by focusing on a narrow effect whilst being excused from the responsibility of looking at all-cause effects is one which has evolved perniciously over severral decades, with the acquiescence of regulators worldwide.
It relies on the faulty assumption - in fact a fairy-tale no less - that modern treatments have highly targeted effects without unwanted 2nd or 3rd order adverse effects.
This hubris is entirely consistent with the prevailing lack of appreciation for the unpredictability of complex systems (such as human physiology), and the dangers inherent in tinkering with the fundamental elements thereof.
I would actually say “zero”; this data is totally meaningless in terms of relevance to human health.
I don't even get the contagion idea of the "flu".
If it were contagious, why doesn't the winter flu season in the North hemisphere carry over to the southern hemisphere in their summer and vice versa?
The flu is likely a result of low vitamin D as it happens in a low sun season...
Oh and the equator has a pretty much flat line of "flu".
Contagious? Nope... Environmental.
Years ago when the Cochrane Report was un-compromised they posted a meta-analysis that referred to the influenza vaccines as "worthless" in their published report. Yes, they used the word "worthless"!