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On 8 February 2018, Erin Elizabeth, the founder of the reality-adjacent website Health Nut News, published an article claiming that a public health official had stated her belief that this year’s flu epidemic was the result of a virus mutated by the production of influenza vaccines. Her piece, which inexplicably carried the headline ABC: Experts Say Flu Shot Potentially Caused the Flu Epidemic despite not once mentioning or citing ABC News in its text, rested solely on a single quote from a Burnett County, Wisconsin, nurse which was found in an article published by the local newspaper the Burnett County Sentinel (described repeatedly in Elizabeth's piece as an example of the mainstream media): Elizabeth’s article strongly suggests that she believes the nurse intended this statement to imply that the H3N2 virus is a mega-bug created as a result of the production of a vaccine against it. This interpretation, however, represents a full-scale misunderstanding of the vaccine manufacturing process and is likely (though our request for comment from Treague has not been returned) a misrepresentation of what the nurse was trying to convey. To understand the confusion, it helps to know how the flu shot is typically manufactured. The most common process for the influenza vaccine is what the CDC terms an egg-based manufacturing process. Under this method, strains of influenza are injected into chicken eggs that sustain the virus, allowing it to proliferate and incubate before the antigens (chemicals formed by the virus that produce an immune response) produced in the egg are harvested: As we explained in a debunker of another Elizabeth post just one month ago, a leading hypothesis for why vaccination against H3N2 (the most virulent strain this season) is so ineffective is that during the fertilized egg portion of the production process, the virus may mutate at a faster rate in (or it may react differently to) the egg matrix in which it is grown. As described in a January 2018 New England Journal of Medicine perspective piece, many studies have demonstrated that H3N2 can adapt itself to the conditions of the (avian) egg, resulting in the creation of antigens (and therefore vaccines) that have little or no effect on humans: This means that, as Treague stated, a plausible reason discussed in the medical literature regarding the flu shot’s ineffectiveness is due to the mutations that the virus made in the processing of the vaccine itself. What this does not mean, however, is that a mutated superbug was created by humans, as suggested by Elizabeth. The problem is not that a new virus has been created that cannot be controlled; the problem is that the virus changed slightly while in the egg, producing a harvest of irrelevant antigens for vaccine production. The notion that a virus can mutate, while perhaps scary sounding, is far from revelatory. All strains of the influenza virus are in a constant state of relatively rapid mutation — this is why the flu shot changes every year based on the predictions of scientists monitoring the prevalence and drift of flu strains around the world. Elizabeth then goes on to suggest that, despite having to hunt for a vague quote in an obscure local paper to make her case, that other experts agree: The primary expert she cites is Dr. Mercola, who -- outside of being fined or warned by the FTC and FDA for making unsubstantiated or misleading medical claims -- is Elizabeth’s partner. His views are well outside the mainstream, are oftentimes poorly researched and erroneous, and are strongly motivated by his anti-vaccine readership. Regardless, the premise of a bad sci-fi movie epidemic caused by vaccine production gone wrong is based on a willfully misleading or grossly incorrect interpretation of a vague quote highlighted to scare readers and generate clicks, not illuminate the issue. The notion that humans caused the most problematic strain in this year’s flu season is not only incorrect, it is not even what the nurse’s quote is likely suggesting. Another quote from the nurse in the Burnett County Sentinel story is less difficult to misconstrue:
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