|
?:reviewBody
|
-
On 17 October 2014, a natural news blog posted an article (which had initially been published over a year earlier by a different alternative health news site) reporting that a Johns Hopkins scientist ... issued a blistering report on influenza vaccines in the British Medical Journal (BMJ). The article, timed to the start of flu season, spread rapidly on social media sites and sparked renewed interest in the subject of flu vaccines. The article referenced a 16 May 2013 feature by Peter Doshi that was published in the British Medical Journal. However, the importance of that BMJ feature was greatly exaggerated by the natural news sites that used it as the basis for their own articles. Despite BMJ's authoritative reputation in the medical world, items published by that journal as features are not medical studies but rather pieces run under a News & Views heading. Readers unfamiliar with the BMJ can easily confuse claims made in feature articles for peer-reviewed research findings. Moreover, Johns Hopkins University had nothing to do with the so-called blistering report about flu vaccinations touted in natural news articles Peter Doshi is neither a virologist nor a epidemiologist, but rather an anthropologist who completed a fellowship in comparative effectiveness research at Johns Hopkins. He conducted no research into influenza or vaccines at Johns Hopkins, nor does he speak for the university on that subject. In Peter Doshi's British Medical Journal feature, he that argued the potential risks of aggressive vaccination against the flu have not been highlighted sufficiently, and that the benefits of the flu shot are overestimated: Doshi strongly suggested, without ever actually saying so, that the flu vaccine may not be beneficial at all. But he never came close to proving that point -- instead, he continually harped about the notion that the effectiveness of the vaccine (and studies thereof) didn't apply equally to everyone (an obvious point) and repeatedly picked nits about whether the precise percentages reported in published studies on the vaccine are accurate. As Forbes noted of his claims: The natural news blog post referencing Doshi's 2013 BMJ feature also quoted Dr. Russell Blaylock: Blaylock, a former neurosurgeon, has a history of issuing dubious, conspiracy-based warnings about a number of suspected dangers in both science-based medicine and the environment at large, including aspartame, chemtrails, cookware, and dental amalgams. A 2009 profile in a Canadian newspaper quoted Blaylock on his belief that the Affordable Healthcare Act (or Obamacare) was in actuality a depopulation effort: The claims made by Doshi and echoed by Blaylock hinge on a flawed, two-pronged premise: flu vaccines are a large moneymaker for pharmaceutical companies, and the vaccines aren't really beneficial because the flu isn't that bad and healthy people don't die from it. First, the flu shot is not nearly as profitable to pharmaceutical companies as many imagine, generating less than one percent of global pharmaceutical company revenues. By contrast, an actual flu epidemic would likely generate far larger profits for those companies: Moreover, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), tens of thousands of people (many otherwise healthy) die each year of the flu. The agency reported in 2013 that 90 percent of juvenile patients who died of the flu in that season had not been vaccinated: Finally, much of the objection to flu vaccine marketing makes mention of the varying strains of influenza that circulate each year. A 2013 study indicated the flu shot can provide cross protection against non-matching circulating strains even if they are not exactly matched.
(en)
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}