Overuse of Vaccines, Anti-Flu Drugs Could Be Disastrous

As bad as the H1N1 swine flu outbreak may turn out to be, you can be sure that government intervention will only make it worse. In the swine flu debacle of 1976, only one person died from the swine flu itself, but hundreds of Americans were killed or seriously injured by the inoculation the government gave them to stave off the virus.

Disease researchers have begun modeling how a future H1N1-09 swine-flu outbreak would spread throughout the world and have come up with some troubling scenarios. Infectious disease experts are beginning to describe modern efforts to quell seasonal and epidemic influenza with vaccines and anti-viral drugs using wording like "potentially dangerous," "worrisome," and "may do more harm than good."

This is striking in light of the multi-billion dollar worldwide effort to rapidly manufacture huge stocks of vaccines, up to an unprecedented 2 billion doses, against the 2008–09 late-flu season H1N1 swine flu epidemic. Public health officials are fearful this unusual strain of H1N1 influenza virus may mutate into a more lethal form in the fall as did the deadly Spanish flu pandemic of 1918.

Researchers at Shizuoka University in Japan, writing in a recent March 2009 issue of the Public Library of Science (PLoS One), are among the first to sound the alarm that the most relied upon weaponry against the flu, vaccines, may actually apply "immunological pressure on circulating strains of the flu which might engender the emergence of genetic variants with enhanced potential for pathogenicity in humans." Translation: mass vaccination, unless well monitored, may actually induce the dreaded gene mutation that could result in more cases, increased hospitalizations and a larger death toll. Read more