If you believed the media hype, you’d think we’re headed for a 1918 pandemic this flu season. Breathless accounts of imminent mass death and overloaded public health agencies were accompanied by dramatic images of children wearing masks. The clarion call arose: “Vaccinate or die!”
Except, not so much. (Amazing, isn’t it? This sort of morbid media hysteria has never misled us before.) More recent reports point to a “moderate” flu season that just seems worse because last year’s was so mild. I would argue that making it seem worse serves the profit margins of the various entities that do so, but that’s just a silly conspiracy theory, right?
Part of my snarkitude here derives from the fact that I have the flu. Or, at least I’m pretty damn sure I do. Some of what people chalk up as the flu is really just “flulike symptoms”—a bad cold or some other greebly—which makes it impossible to determine how many people actually get—or die from—the flu.
But I know my own body, and I haven’t felt like this in 20 years—like, achy-shaky, head-exploding, lung-constricting, fever-and-chills, hacking-and-snorting CRAP—not since that time I passed a plastic water bottle full of cheap vodka around the back of a Cleveland-bound Greyhound on the way home for Christmas break.
My current condition was not nearly so well earned, but was the result of an easily quantifiable “perfect storm” of circumstances that lowered my resistance and exposed me at just the wrong moment. Infection (and crankiness), mine.
If the vaccination zealots are to be believed, I got just what I deserved, because I didn’t get a flu shot.
I’m not the kind of person who goes in for much in the way of modern health care. I can count the number of times I’ve taken ibuprofen over the past 20 years on the fingers of one hand, and antibiotics, zero. I’m of the firm philosophical belief that given a clean, nutritious diet, a sensible lifestyle and the wide availability of sufficiently effective traditional remedies, there’s no reason to contribute to the pharmaceutical industry’s fantasy of a United States of Addicts.
The vaccinazis say this makes me a pariah who’s responsible for killing babies and old people. In fact, they’re aggressively attempting to make my philosophical choices untenable, if not illegal, by spending millions of dollars lobbying decision-makers to mandate flu vaccine and deny people such things as jobs and health care (how’s that for circular logic?) simply for refusing to be vaccinated.
Since when is it a crime to get sick? Since it interferes with medical industry profits.
Vaccines have undeniably served to advance public health rather miraculously in the past century. When it came to the ravages of diseases such as smallpox and polio, the obvious risks of injecting yourself with small amounts of deadly viruses laced with various nasty chemicals turned out to be well worth it.
But there are some key differences with influenza, which is not a single disease, but an endlessly mutating strand of different diseases that will never be eradicated. More important (from Big Pharma’s perspective), unlike other vaccines, flu vaccine is administered annually on a lifelong basis, which spells many billions of dollars in potential profits.
Never mind that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention claim only about 60 percent effectiveness at best—a vastly inflated estimate, according to some recent meta-analyses—or that the vaccine itself can make people sick. The vast majority of the CDC’s influenza Web page is devoted to promoting the vaccine, while way down at the bottom in fine print there’s one tiny link titled “Good Health Habits for Prevention.”
And never mind Big Pharma’s long, sordid record of gaming regulatory processes, falsifying studies, covering up dangerous products, escaping culpability for adverse reactions and strong-arming and bribing doctors and public officials. Really, why would anyone of sound mind expect vaccines to be any safer than the rest of the poison peddled by these criminal corporations?
Unfortunately, our nation is not of sound mind. We’re so conditioned to reach for a drug every time we face the slightest inconvenience—regardless of the risks or side effects—that we bend over and say, “Stick it to me!” We think it’s our imperial right to eat fast-food dog shit three times a day with no ill effects and still raise a four-hour boner on demand.
I say fuck the flu shot. And fuck Pharma and its army of lobbyists and paid shills, with their guilt-tripping, body-invading bullshit. If I die of the flu, it’ll be one less human on this ridiculously overburdened planet.
There. I feel better already.
This article appears in Jan 17-23, 2013.
Media hype is very different from actual science, and the science is firmly on the side of vaccination as one of the greatest public-health achievements in history. Glad to see you giving props to the polio vaccine, however much you’d like to misrepresent it as a brew of “nasty chemicals.” You get a much bigger dose of nastiness when a dog licks your face, compared to the purified and sterile ingredients of a vaccine, but I guess it’s up to you to choose which chemicals to villainize and which to overlook as somehow not having a molecular structure, however arbitrary this distinction might be.
Also, vaccines are getting more and more pure. Lots of them aren’t even made with “deadly viruses,” such as the vaccines for HPV and hepatitis B, which are made with yeast-produced viral proteins that stimulate an immune response without containing one iota of viral DNA. And, BTW, the vaccines that have been made with “deadly viruses” were made with either inactivated viruses or weakened viruses, i.e., they weren’t deadly. To act like scientists were just stuffing wild-type polio-viruses into vials of vaccines, willy-nilly, is rather hyperbolic.
And I love it when people talk about how much they “know [their] own body,” when these are the folk who have the absolute least amount of knowledge about the amazing innerworkings of their incredible bodies. Instead they reduce the human body down to something simplistic and boring, completely devoid of the awe a human body inspires. If you’d take a few months to scratch the surface of basic biology, especially immunology and infectious disease, you would be absolutely blown away by the beautiful, intricate systems we have evolved, which holistically work together in concert, keeping us alive and conscious and interacting with the world. Sure, we know our experience as embodied organisms, but we have no clue what’s going on in our individual bodies at any given time at a cellular level.
As to the “clean, nutritious diet, [and] sensible lifestyle,” supplemented by allegedly “effective traditional remedies” — you know that’s how the majority of our forebears lived, right? And, for the most part, they died of infectious diseases. Everyone knows we shouldn’t be shotgunning Twinkies, and I hope we all know that a healthy lifestyle is not mutually exclusive with an appreciation of modern medicine. No need to denigrate pro-science, pro-medicine folk as people who are too lazy or unvirtuous to adhere to this “clean … lifestyle” of which you speak. Heck, with the exception of the alternatives to medicine, which I eschew, that describes me pretty well.
People who swear up and down that there is some “Big Pharma conspiracy” when Occam’s razor simply tells us that vaccination is a gain for public health … Well, there’s no reasoning with conspiracy theorists. The very nature of their unfalsifiable theories makes that impossible. Reasonable people can disagree on mandating vaccination and other such issues, but to deny the basic science, as an entity separate from laws and social mores, is just ignorance.
Vaccines? Not big money-makers for the pharmaceutical industry. Yes, even the annual flu shot. This isn’t some cholesterol med you’re taking every day for your whole life. And by the way, researchers are working on a “universal” vaccine that will do away with the annual shots.
P.S. Rush Limbaugh called, he wants his asinine portmanteau back. HAR!
Great article! I fully agree.
I’m 76 years old and have never had a flu shot, and I do not take ANY prescription drugs. I refuse to yield to the media hype and the pressure and fear mongering from the medical establishment.
As you say, there are a few immunizations that have been very beneficial, but shots and prescription drugs are, for the most part, profit centers from Big Pharma, not a health benefit for the general public.
Thomas Greco
When I first moved from Tucson to Nebraska in ’95 I had a flu shot and that year I got a horrible bout of the flu (literally felt like I was going to die for about 5 days). I promised myself I would never get the vaccine again, and 17 years later I have not had the flu. Well there is one exception to that: last week end I got the rumblings of a stomach flu and started to have very loose bowels. I took some homeopathic “oscillococcinun” and have felt fine. I also stay away from pharmaceuticals. I am 55 years old and do not take any over the counter or prescription drugs. I am amazed at people 15-20 years younger than me who are taking drugs for high cholesteral, acid reflex and arthritis. Most of these people are overweight and as Randy states, eat fast-food dog shit 3 times a day….
To Annabolic: There is real science and there is junk science and I try to sort out the differences. Pharma has a sordid track record, as Randy suggests, of hyping specific fraudulent studies that they claim are scientific to push their drugs (think Viox). And yes our ancestors ate cleaner (pesticide free) and healthy whole foods. They did not have a population with 66% of the people overweight or obese. Many died young because little was known about preventative hygiene such as the importance of treating sewage water and washing your hands. They knew nothing about micro organisms, e-coli or germ theory. The bubonic plague killed millions in the Middle Ages because they knew nothing about the rats who carried parasitic fleas that carried the diseases. Many women died from childbirth and many children did not make it to adulthood. Many others died from dangerous working conditions on the job. Many people died from ignorance or from circumstances they had little to no control over.
People today die from heart attacks, cancer and diabetes. This is not due to ignorance. This is due to lifestyle choices for the most part. The research is out there and we know how to lower our risks to these diseases. These are diseases that are often caused by smoking cigs, eating high fat and sugary diets, sedentary lifestyles, and alcohol/drug abuse. The Big Pharm companies make multi billions of dollars off of people who are hooked on the prescription drugs to keep them alive. One of the top 5 causes of death in our country is overuse or misuse of prescription drugs. Big Pharm would loose billions of dollars if people simply started eating healthier diets and exercised more. Pharma does not make money off of healthy people. That is a statistical fact.
It is one thing to defend science–a rational and experimental approach to discovery of how the world works, but it is another thing to defend Big Pharma in their deceitful and “junk” science. There is no doubt helpful medicines can and do save lives. Randy stated that in his article. (Polio vaccine and small pox). But the need for this tremendous push to over-medicate our population (and feed drugs to our food source–cows, pigs, chickens) with anti-biotics, anit-psychotics, anti-depressives, ADHD drugs, statin drugs, viagra, acid-reflux, high cholesterol, insomnia disorders, and the list goes on and on….deserves bold questioning and critical thinking. Also, keep in mind how much of Pharma and Big Ag are now over medicating our children. This ranges from all the junk found in junk food to all the meds given to children to control their behaviors and their “lack” of attention. There is clear, scientific research that shows children who spend less time outside have much greater attention problems than children who play outside for an hour a day. Yet Pharma pushes drugs for children who have attention problems and we have really no research to show us how drugs are affecting children long term. It really is a distortion of great magnitude.
BTW: It has nothing to do with conspiracy. It has to do with humongous profits made by the Pharm industries. If you believe that people are driven by the desire for money is a “conspiracy” then you know nothing about history and human beings. “Conspiracy” is a meaningless and over used word to label someone who is in disagreement. One man’s “conspiracy’ is another man’s use of critical thinking skills. Please understand the difference.
Great column. I won’t be getting vaccinated either, but it seems to make sense to use the hand-washing strategy for limiting risk. However, most of the patrons at LA Fitness think that’s just a bunch of baloney. They move from one piece of equipment to the next without a moment’s concern for themselves and others. Using the FREE wipes and sanitizer which are available throughout the facility is out of the question to the unwashed masses there.
I suspect they’re the same folks who’ll say we need to continue with completely unrestricted animal experimentation because “we need to find cures for duh-zeezes in yoomin beans.”