Tag: influenza

Govt. Researchers: Flu Shots Not Effective in Elderly, After All

Dr. Reichert: “We realized we had incendiary material.”

Dr. Reichert said the researchers thought their study would prove flu vaccinations helped.

Dr. Reichert: “We were trying to do something mainstream. That’s for sure.”

Sharyl: “Were you surprised?”

Dr. Reichert: “Astonished.”

Sharyl: “Did you check the data a couple of times to make sure?”

Dr. Reichert: “Well, even more than that. We’ve looked at other countries now and the same is true.”

An important and definitive “mainstream” government study done nearly two decades ago got little attention because the science came down on the wrong side.

It found that after decades and billions of dollars spent promoting flu shots for the elderly, the mass vaccination program did not result in saving lives. In fact, the death rate among the elderly increased substantially.

The authors of the study admitted a pro-vaccine bias going into the study. Here was the history as described to me: Public health experts long assumed flu shots were effective in the elderly. But, paradoxically, all the best studies done on the question failed to demonstrate a benefit. Instead of considering that they, the experts, could be wrong–instead of believing the scientific data–the public health experts assumed the studies were wrong. After all, flu shots have to work, right?

So the NIH launched an effort to do “the” definitive study that would actually prove, for the first time, once and for all, that flu shots were beneficial to the elderly. The government would gather some of the brightest scientific minds for the research, and adjust for all kinds of factors that could be masking that presumed benefit.

Keep reading

Vaccine advisory board votes to remove controversial mercury-based compound from flu vax

In a win for the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) voted 5-1 to limit flu vaccines to only those free of thimerosal. The mercury-containing preservative, largely phased out of childhood vaccines by 2001, still lingers in some multi-dose flu shots. But with 96% of U.S. flu vaccines for the 2024-2025 season already thimerosal-free, single-dose options are not hard to come by.

The committee, freshly revamped by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., also voted 5-1 to mandate thimerosal-free flu vaccines for children 18 and under and pregnant women. 

The effort to remove thimerosal began in the late 1990s, sparked by growing public and scientific scrutiny of mercury exposure. In 1997, the FDA Modernization Act prompted a review of mercury in medical products, including thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative used since the 1930s to prevent microbial contamination in multi-dose vaccine vials.

Keep reading

Moderna To Ask For Clearance For Combination COVID-Influenza Vaccine

Moderna is going to ask regulators to approve its combination vaccine against COVID-19 and influenza, the company said on June 30.

The company said a phase 3 study evaluating its influenza vaccine candidate, mRNA-1010—which utilizes the same messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) platform as its COVID-19 vaccine—showed positive effectiveness.

In the trial, which featured 40,805 participants and compared mRNA-1010 to an existing seasonal flu vaccine in adults aged 50 and up, the relative protection from the candidate was 26.6 percent better. In a subgroup analysis among participants aged at least 65, the relative efficacy was 27.4 percent.

“Today’s strong Phase 3 efficacy results are a significant milestone in our effort to reduce the burden of influenza in older adults,” Stéphane Bancel, Moderna’s CEO, said in a statement.

Several companies, including Moderna, have been planning to introduce combination shots against COVID-19 and influenza.

Moderna, however, in May withdrew its application for approval for its combination vaccine, a move the company said came after consulting with the Food and Drug Administration.

Moderna at the time said it planned to resubmit the application before the end of 2025 after it received efficacy data from the phase 3 trial for mRNA 1010.

“An mRNA-based flu vaccine has the potential advantage to more precisely match circulating strains, support rapid response in a future influenza pandemic, and pave the way for COVID-19 combination vaccines,” Bancel said on Monday.

The trial results have been fully published or peer reviewed. Moderna said it plans to submit the results to a peer-reviewed journal.

Keep reading

CDC Advisers Vote To Recommend Removal Of Mercury From Influenza Vaccines

Advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on June 26 advised the agency to stop recommending influenza vaccines containing a mercury-based preservative.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) in a series of votes reaffirmed the existing recommendation that virtually all individuals aged at least 6 months of age receive an annual influenza shot. The panel further advised, though, that individuals only receive thimerosal-free vaccines.

About 95 percent of influenza vaccines administered in the United States in late 2024 and early 2025 were free of thimerosal, according to the Food and Drug Administration. Dr. Tracy Hoeg, an FDA official, told the committee that there appear to be enough influenza vaccine doses without thimerosal for the upcoming virus season, which runs from the fall into the winter.

A spokesperson for Sanofi told The Epoch Times in an email: “We acknowledge the recommendation of the new ACIP. We now await the decision by the CDC on the path forward.

“We will have sufficient supply of Sanofi flu vaccine to support customer preference for this season.”

Seqirus, which also produces influenza vaccines with thimerosal, has not responded to requests for comment.

ACIP provides advice to the CDC’s director, who typically adopts the recommendations.

The CDC has no acting director listed on its website. President Donald Trump’s nominee for the post, Susan Monarez, is being considered by the Senate. The CDC and its parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, did not respond to requests for comment.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. earlier in the year adopted some recommendations offered by ACIP.

Kennedy has long opposed vaccines with thimerosal, and the panel heard before the vote from Lyn Redwood, a past president of a nonprofit that Kennedy founded who is now listed as an employee of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Redwood said in her presentation that a number of studies have provided evidence against thimerosal, including a 2003 paper that found an association between thimerosal exposure and tics and a 2007 study that found links to several positive and several negative associations, including a lower measure of executive functioning.

“There have been studies that have found evidence of harm,” Redwood said.

Keep reading

GAO Backs ‘Universal Vaccine’ Built From Multiple Virus Fragments Fused Into One—Influenza Takes Center Stage Again

While this Frankenstein-style injection is being marketed as a tool to stop future pandemics, the virus at the center of it all is influenza—the same virus the U.S. government has spent years manipulating through gain-of-function research and now claims is on the verge of causing the next global outbreak.

“Since 2015, most clinical work on universal vaccines has focused on the flu,” the GAO states in its May 2025 Science & Tech Spotlight report.

“Multiple universal vaccine candidates targeting the flu… have reached clinical trials.”

This aligns with what we’ve already exposed: Federal agencies have been conducting bird flu gain-of-function experiments for over a decade, pushing mRNA and DNA vaccines for poultry, and stockpiling antiviral contracts—all while whispering warnings about H5N1 jumping to humans.

The Trump administration recently announced the development of a $500 million “next-generation, universal vaccine platform” called ‘Generation Gold Standard’ that will focus on avian influenza “bird flu” jab creation.

Led by Obama-nominated Comptroller General Gene Dodaro, GAO is now confirming another next step in that orchestrated rollout: a universal flu vaccine that doesn’t just target one strain—but uses recombined fragments from many strains at once.

“Scientists can now fuse together microscopic pieces of many different virus strains, increasing the number of strains that can be targeted in a single dose,” the GAO report explains.

This isn’t a new flu shot.

It’s a molecular chimera—a biotech construct made from the stitched-together parts of viruses that don’t exist naturally.

Keep reading

The Non-Existent Flu Cases of 2020

In 2020, the United States faced the shock of a new pandemic — but also a baffling medical mystery: the disappearance of the seasonal flu. While COVID-19 cases dominated headlines and hospital beds, flu diagnoses plummeted to “too low to estimate,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with later estimates at a mere 2000.

That’s not just a statistical anomaly — it’s a statistical impossibility. From an estimated 48 million cases in 2019–2020, the flu dropped to 2000 cases, statistically zero, in 2020–2021, amounting to a 99.999998% decrease — or put another way, a nearly 10 million percent drop. In the realm of infectious disease, that kind of disappearance doesn’t happen without a force far greater than a virus. In this case, that force may have been government incentives, diagnostic bias, and political opportunity.

Side-by-Side Comparison: Flu vs. COVID-19 (and Total Deaths)

Here is a year-by-year comparison of flu and COVID-19 cases in the U.S., alongside total recorded deaths from all causes:

YearFlu CasesCOVID-19 CasesTotal U.S. Deaths
2015–1624 millionN/A2.7 million
2016–1729 millionN/A2.7 million
2017–1845 millionN/A2.8 million
2018–1929 millionN/A2.8 million
2019–2048 millionN/A2.9 million
2020–212000~20 million3.4 million
2021–2211 million~35 million3.5 million
2022–2331 million~25 million3.3 million
2023–2440 million~15 million3.3 million

If mask mandates, social distancing, and lockdowns truly drove flu cases to extinction in 2020, why did COVID-19 — transmitted in much the same way — surge to 20 million cases that same year? It’s a paradox that challenges the public narrative.

Keep reading

Moderna Pulls Application for FDA Approval of Flu-COVID Shot After FDA Calls for New Clinical Trials

Moderna is withdrawing its application for U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of its mRNA-1083 combination flu and COVID-19 vaccine, the company announced today — just one day after the FDA said it would require new clinical trials to approve COVID-19 boosters for healthy people under 65.

According to Fierce Biotech, the company will resubmit its application when data from a Phase 3 trial of its mRNA-1010 flu vaccine, which is a component of the combined shot, are available later this year. The company expects to have interim data from the trial available this summer.

Markets reacted negatively to the news, with Moderna’s shares falling 1.4% in premarket trading on Wednesday, The Guardian reported.

According to Reuters, Moderna’s decision to withdraw its application at this time “is the latest sign of increased regulatory scrutiny of the vaccine approval process since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took the top U.S. health job earlier this year.”

Last week, for instance, the FDA approved Novavax’s new COVID-19 vaccine, but limited its approval to groups that are considered high-risk.

Sayer Ji, co-founder of Stand for Health Freedom and founder and director of GreenMedInfo, said Moderna’s decision to withdraw its application is “telling” and “appears to reflect not only concerns over efficacy but also a growing public skepticism toward hastily developed, multi-antigen formulations that lack sufficient long-term safety data.”

Ji said:

“The withdrawal may be a preemptive move to avoid public scrutiny or regulatory resistance tied to unresolved questions in their clinical data. Combination shots, especially those involving mRNA platforms, introduce compounded risks due to the simultaneous delivery of multiple immunogenic agents.

“These risks are poorly understood and grossly under-evaluated, particularly in vulnerable populations. The immunological complexity of such a vaccine also raises questions about long-term impacts on immune regulation, potential autoimmunity and unintended synergistic effects that could compromise health rather than protect it.”

Keep reading

A new study finds that flu vaccines have negative efficacy, meaning the risk of getting flu is higher after vaccination

Based in Ohio, USA, Cleveland Clinic is considered a leader in clinical research, education and care. With tens of thousands of employees, they are uniquely placed to investigate outcomes of staff vaccination policy including covid and influenza vaccine mandates.

In 2022, Cleveland Clinic researchers led by Dr. Nabin Shrestha and Dr. Steven Gordon at the Department of Infectious Diseases followed over 51,000 employees. They found that the proportional risk for covid infection increased with the number of covid vaccine doses an individual received.

This is known as negative efficacy and can be due to a multitude of factors, including but not limited to:

  • the fact that RNA viruses (including coronaviruses and influenza) mutate rapidly, rendering vaccines targeting prior strains useless. This is known as immune imprinting, or “original antigenic sin”;
  • immune suppression caused by persistence of circulating covid vaccine-induced spike protein can increase the risk of infection as well as other immune-related disorders;
  • repeated exposure to vaccine-induced spike protein can result in antibodies switching from protective IgG1, IgG2 and IgG3, to the less protective and immune-suppressing IgG4 class, which is also associated with other risks.

Influenza is also an RNA virus, but with haemagglutinin (“HA”) and neuraminidase (“NA”) proteins on its surface, rather than the spike proteins present on coronaviruses. As with the spike protein, HA and NA proteins mutate rapidly. This forms the theory behind annual updates to influenza vaccines as manufacturers attempt to predict evolutionary changes to the HA and NA proteins.

In a recent study, the same Cleveland Clinic researchers followed over 53,000 employees through the 2024-2025 US influenza season, which lasted for 25 weeks from 1 October 2024. The preprint of their study was published at ‘Effectiveness of the Influenza Vaccine During the 2024-2025 Respiratory Viral Season’.

Cleveland Clinic employees are mandated either to receive an annual influenza vaccine or to seek an exemption on medical or religious grounds. By the end of the study, 82.1% of the study cohort had received an influenza vaccine, and 98.7% of these received an inactivated 3-valent influenza vaccine.

A proportional hazards model was used to calculate the relative risk between vaccinated and unvaccinated people, adjusting for age, sex, clinical nursing job and location to minimise potential bias. Participants were only counted as vaccinated seven days after receiving a single dose of influenza vaccine.

The outcome for influenza-vaccinated employees by the end of the study was a statistically significant 26.9% increased risk of testing positive for influenza compared with employees who did not receive the seasonal vaccine.

Keep reading

Army soldier’s long-time quest for religious exemption from mandated flu shot

Though the COVID-19 pandemic brought widespread resistance to the Biden-era military’s vaccine mandate, COVID isn’t the only mandated shot being resisted by some service members for religious reasons.

Army Sergeant Dan McGriff (a pseudonym) spoke to WorldNetDaily on the condition of anonymity, anticipating reprisals. He emphasized that his views do not reflect those of the Department of Defense or the Department of the Army.

In the summer of 2021 during the thick of the pandemic, the non-commissioned officer “saw the writing on the wall,” suspecting a COVID-19 shot mandate was on the way for military service members. So, in August 2021, he was not surprised to see the rollout of former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s now-rescinded mandate.

After conferring with his wife, he made the decision to seek exemption, not only from the COVID-19 shot, but for all future vaccines as well.

“Some people were getting responses back within 30 to 90 days at most, but mine took about six months, going all the way up to the Army surgeon general to be denied or accepted,” McGriff told WND. “And in March 2022, I received my initial denial.”

While the decision could be appealed, the Army sergeant said there was no guidance available. “I sent my appeal within seven days, and from that moment on I was a ghost.” He explained that even though he had approved orders for a new duty station, he was not allowed to move because he was “unvaccinated.”

During this period, he was also barred from attending schools or trainings that could have advanced his career.

Keep reading

3 studies show definitively that the influenza vaccines don’t work

We’ve known for over 20 years now that flu vaccines don’t work.

So why is the CDC and mainstream media still promoting them?

It’s been confirmed in two other studies since then, one that explicitly used a different method and found exactly the same thing and one paper that accidentally exposed the fraud (they only realized it after I pointed it out).

Still no change.

Keep reading