Why Bloomberg Is All Wrong about Vaccines
February 19, 2013
We don’t need more crony capitalist solutions.
In the Bloomberg.com editorial, “Got
the Flu? The Market Can Fix That” (Jan. 22), the writer says that
vaccines are the only game in town for controlling the flu and
concludes: “Making a new vaccine typically takes a decade and can cost
$1 billion. A project of that size is better suited to large
pharmaceutical companies….Given this market reality, the US government
should design incentives to get the industry more deeply involved.”
This sounds sensible until you consider what it actually means. Do we
really want a world in which the government envisions a vaccine, helps
develop it, subsidizes it, then evaluates its effectiveness and safety,
and finally mandates it for children? How objective can we expect the
government to be in evaluating, approving, and mandating its own
product?
We don’t mean to quibble, but we also want to know how the writer can
describe this as a market solution. What kind of Orwellian language is
this? What is actually being recommended is a government solution
working through Big Pharma companies, which is a formula for crony
capitalism. If this system leads to out-of-control costs in defense
procurement, it is bad enough. If it goes awry in matters pertaining to
our children’s health, that is even more serious.
A quick glance at
the number of FDA-approved drugs recalled each year because they are
later found to be dangerous is shocking. Let’s not make that worse by
having the government approve and mandate what are essentially its own
products.
The editorial is also too quick to accept widely accepted “facts” that
are not facts at all. It begins with: “Influenza…each year kills as many
as a half-million people, including 3,000 to 49,000 Americans.” It is
true that, as Bloomberg reported in 2010,
the CDC
estimates the annual toll to be 23,607. But these figures are
actually a fabrication: the CDC has used a mathematical estimate based
on the assumption that if a death certificate had “respiratory or
circulatory disease” listed as a cause of death, then it should be
counted as a “flu-related” death. The Journal of American Physicians and
Surgeons has been highly critical of the CDC’s methodology.
Data from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) show
an
average of 1,348 actual flu deaths per year—a mere 5.7% of the CDC’s
estimate. In fact, 2010 showed
only
500 deaths directly attributable to flu.
Nor are flu vaccines “the best weapons we’ve got,” as the editorial
states. There are currently three different “epidemics” hitting the US:
“true” influenza (type A, type B, or seasonal H1N1 influenza), norovirus
(“stomach flu”), and whooping cough. According
to a meta-analysis published in the weekly peer-reviewed medical
journal The Lancet, only 2.7% of non-vaccinated adults caught the flu,
which means that 97.3% of them did not. Among vaccinated adults, 1.2%
caught the flu. This means the big national vaccine drive will possibly
keep 1.5 people out of 100 from catching the flu. In addition, there is
no evidence that the flu vaccine provides any protection whatsoever for
adults 65 and over—even though the elderly are one of the flu vaccine
campaign’s target populations, and
USA Today reports that so far this flu season, people over 65 are
dying from a laboratory-confirmed case of influenza at a rate of 116 per
100,000.
There is also some evidence that the vaccine itself poses health risks.
In Canada, researchers found that people who got a flu shot
were more likely to get infected with the H1N1 pandemic virus than
people who hadn’t received a flu shot—and this has since been verified
in animal studies. In addition, the
US flu
shot usually contains thimerosal, an organomercury compound used as
a preservative. Mercury is highly toxic and there is worry that this
form of it might be linked to
developmental
disabilities and
abnormalities in the brain similar to those in autistic patients.
There are also questions about a possible link to Alzheimer’s. Mercury
has been removed from most US vaccines; flu is the exception. Europe
does not allow it in any vaccines. Why do we?
Given the uncertain effectiveness and safety questions, it might be
better to skip the flu shot, build up your immunity instead with vitamin
D3 (there is now
a great deal of scientific research supporting this), and if you
become infected, take vitamin A (real A, not beta carotene;
Dr. Wright recommends 25,000 IU of vitamin A per day). Or use it in
conjunction with other tried-and-true
natural remedies.
Why aren’t the FDA and the medical establishment interested in these
natural preventives and cures? As all of us at ANH know, the problem is
a bureaucratic “Catch-22” that is blocking better, safer, preventive and
life-saving treatments. All drugs must be FDA-approved. If a substance
has not been declared an FDA-approved drug, no health claims may be made
about it, regardless of the scientific backing for the claim.
But, as noted in the editorial, taking a product through the FDA drug
approval process is extraordinarily expensive. Natural substances
generally cannot be patented. Without the protection of a patent, and
the extremely high prices that a patent would allow a company to charge,
the manufacturer could never hope to make back its investment.
Consequently natural products and research languish, with no hope of
ever being able to say that anything prevents or treats the flu.
No wonder everyone thinks that vaccines are the only way to prevent the
flu. Nothing else can get FDA approval—for purely financial reasons! All
of this defies common sense. And it is not just a problem for treating
the flu. The same problem exists in cancer research and other medical
fields.
Bloomberg is a company that has thrived by selling information to Wall
Street. Wall Street has had plenty of money to buy Bloomberg terminals
because it gets to distribute masses of new money just printed by the
government’s Federal Reserve. Michael Bloomberg, the company’s founder,
has used his fortune to win three terms as mayor of New York, despite a
two-term limit when he started, and has also used his vast fortune in
other ways to win friends and influence people. It is not entirely
surprising therefore that Bloomberg recommends a crony capitalist
approach to beating the flu epidemic. But no, we don’t need an even
deeper government–Big Pharma partnership. That is exactly what we don’t
need.
The Alliance for Natural Health USA
1350 Connecticut Ave NW, 5th Floor, Washington, DC 20036 Ph: 800.230.2762
www.anh-usa.org
http://www.anh-usa.org/why-bloomberg-is-all-wrong-about-vaccines/
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