Flu Vaccines Don't Work for Kids or the Elderly

What Can We Learn From The Past

This article was posted in 2005 by the Center for Medical Consumers. It summarizes several studies that were done at that time but never got the attention they deserved.

Flu vaccines provide virtually no benefit to children. That’s the conclusion of a new review of all relevant studies. Interestingly, the news comes at a time when some health officials have begun to recommend the vaccination of all children in order to prevent them from passing on the flu to their elderly relatives. The review follows on the heels of a study that looked at three decades’ worth of data and found that vaccines for the elderly are not as effective as previously thought. And contrary to conventional medical wisdom, vaccines do not seem to reduce flu-related deaths in elderly people.

To determine the value of flu vaccines to children, Tom Jefferson, MD, and colleagues at the Cochrane Collaboration looked at over a thousand studies. They selected 14 high-quality clinical trials in which vaccinated children had been compared with unvaccinated children. The combined results of these 14 trials were reported in the British journal The Lancet (2/26/05). Here’s the conclusion: “We recorded no convincing evidence that vaccines can reduce mortality, [hospital] admissions, serious complications, and community transmission of influenza.”

The best the Cochrane reviewers could come up with was this: “Vaccines were somewhat effective at reducing school absence…”

Though the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention advises flu vaccines for babies 6-23 months because they tend to suffer more complications once they get the flu, no evidence supports the recommendation.

The Cochrane reviewers found that vaccines had little effect on bronchitis, ear infections, and hospitalizations, compared with the babies given placebo vaccines. In short, the CDC recommendations are irresponsible given the fact that the only two studies that involved babies found no benefit and little is known about adverse effects of these vaccines for babies.