The flu vaccine narrative and the art of explaining away uncomfortable data

My attention was drawn to this post on X from the account of “Physicians for Informed Consent”, which contained the above image and this text:

Studies show the flu vaccine doesn’t reduce deaths from pneumonia and flu.

A 33-year government-funded study found no link between higher flu shot rates and lower death rates. Another study of 7.6 million deaths found no drop in mortality after age 65—despite more vaccinations.

Read more: http://picdata.org/flu-vaccine

#vaccines

The entire flu vaccine narrative is totally ridiculous, as I have pointed out in numerous articles.

The linked article by PIC on the flu vaccine was pretty good and cited some interesting sources.

The very first one of those was a smallish observational study using data from Australia published in 2013 in “Influenza Journal”:

Irv0008 0293

236KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

The study itself is relatively uninteresting, being non-randomised and quite small.

Basically they did lots of swabbing and found lots of different pathogens associated with ILIs (Influenza-like-illnesses).

(To be clear, I do not buy into any model which suggests that swabbing the nose and / or throat and then performing PCR tests on the swabs can tell us anything useful or reproducible about anything. See my disclaimer here.)

However, one finding - and the response to it - is interesting.

They found that the incidence of non-flu ILIs was 60% highter in the kids vaccinated for flu compared to the unvaccinated.

This, of course, is actually unsurprising to those of us who understand the complexity of human biology and the limitations of what intramuscular injections of foreign proteins could possibly do in respect of respiratory illnesses, or rather what actual harms they might cause.

The authors clearly scratched their heads to see if they could explain this away without having to admit that maybe the injections were doing more harm than good - a heretical suggestion.

Maybe, they thought, it was due to increased “health-seeking behaviour” in the parents of the vaccinated, but:

“…parents of vaccinated children were no more likely to seek medical care during an ILI.”

Casting their net more broadly, however, they found a glimmer of hope on the horizon:

However, we did find that health-seeking behaviours, recorded on enrolment (before the ILI observation period), such as hospitalisation (any cause), hearing tests and grommet insertion were significantly more common in the vaccinated groups, suggesting that families that vaccinate children have a prior preference for greater healthcare service usage.

Talk about viewing things through a lens clouded by prior assumptions! This is comical. Rather than considering the possibility that the injections actually caused hospitalisation and ear problems requiring grommet insertion, they just assume that this represents “health-seeking behaviour”.

This is how members of a cult think.

Speaking of which, have a look at this article from the Daily Mail:

The cause, of course, is not jabbing enough:

NSW health minister, Ryan Park blamed vaccine hesitancy for the record-breaking number of emergency department admissions at the start of August.

‘We have had vaccine hesitancy off the back of Covid … and this is what health systems are dealing with, not just in our country, but around the world,’ he said.

‘We need to change that.’

Park said it had been difficult trying to encourage residents to get the vaccine despite it being affordable.

As usual, the people seem to know more about what’s going on than “officials”.

I may well have a look at the other sources cited in the PIC article in due course.

[Update 3 Sept 2026: part 2, in which I review another paper cited by PIC, is here.]

Meanwhile, please do bear in mind all the things which need to be true in order for the results of flu vaccine trials (based on a reduction in laboratory confirmed “flu”) to translate through to net benefit for the recipients:

• The positive PCR test must actually be diagnostic of a target illness. Reader of this blog will know that I have written much on this topic, mainly with the team at Where are the Numbers? In brief, the tests used are so non-specific and over-sensitive so as to render their output meaningless.

• A reduction in the risk of mild symptoms in healthy people translates to a real reduction of the risk of serious illness in those at risk.

• A reduction in symptoms per se is correlated to overall benefit in terms of the target disease, which seems to be an extremely simplistic view of “infection” and “immunity”. Symptoms appear to be indicative of the body’s immune system “dealing with” some threat, and their reduction might simply represent an aberrent (and ultimately less effective) response.

• A reduction in short term infections isn’t simply a postponement, and that the chance of catching the target disease isn’t increased at a later date, meaning that perpetual injections (with unknown safety profile) are then needed to maintain the purported “protective effect”.

• The immune response induced by the injection doesn’t adversely affect the immune system such that it becomes less able to deal with variants of the target illness as they evolve in the future, even if there is some short-term protection.

• There is no increase in off-target illnesses. For example, it has been reported that while some so-called vaccines do reduce the rate of the target illness, the propensity to contract other infectious illnesses is increased. Designs which are focused solely on the target disease as an endpoint will miss these.”

The above is extracted from:

Big Pharma: up to its usual tricks?