Rejecting Flu Vaccine in Pregnancy

The Medicalization of Pregnancy

Women have permitted doctors and pharmaceutical companies privileged access to their fierce and primitive drive toward protecting a pregnancy. They have been made to feel fear, convinced that they need the support of the apparatus of allopathic medicine to get them through this perilous trial.

I’d like to take a moment to pause. Take a deep breath. And ask the women reading this to look inside and to check if that compass is there. Ask if they can hold it gently in their hand and trust that their bodies and minds know how to guide them, when properly supported and cared for.

If you must relinquish your power to doctors, I recommend finding one who acknowledges the awesome dangers of blindly following medical doctrine. Outsourcing our health to pharmaceutical companies is an extremely myopic approach to securing lasting wellness. I’d like to show you that the guiding authorities you have been led to believe are acting in your best interest are guilty of some pretty heinous crimes of abuse and neglect, and never more so than in the pregnant population.

Who Said to Get a Flu Shot While Pregnant?

I dare say that the modern woman has handed over her inner compass. It’s as if we came from generations of master chefs – natural giants in the kitchen, using our senses and instincts to guide us toward nourishing preparations – but we have been recently convinced through the promise of technology and corporate prowess that processed food is more reliable, nutritious, and beneficial. We’ve been convinced that Hamburger Helper is better for our families than a homemade Bolognese.

Enter the ACIP, or the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices

This group of “thought leaders” is charged with the task of determining what vaccines will be pushed upon you during your doctor’s check-ups and wellness visits. It consists of heads of pharmaceutical companies such as Novartis and Sanofi Pasteur, and is a prime example of the enmeshment between the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and industry.

There are several reasons why a committee that behaves in the way this one does should not be one that you trust with your body or your baby.

Since 1997, the ACIP has recommended the trivalent inactivated flu vaccine to pregnant women after the first trimester. Then, in 2004, this recommendation, inexplicably changed and grew, as is the way with vaccine recommendations, to encompass all pregnant women (and every human over 6 months of age), regardless of personal risk factors, immune determinants, diet, regional exposures, and timing of injection.

But they Must Have Determined that it was Safe? How Could They Recommend it?

Determining that something is “safe” in pregnancy is like saying that because individuals don’t have car accidents on passage from point A to B, that riding in a vehicle is safer than walking. For ethical reasons, pharmaceutical products cannot be studied in a randomized manner in pregnancy, severely limiting our ability to look at short or long-term outcomes. The surprising news is that vaccines, the pharmaceutical product in question, have never been studied in a truly placebo controlled manner, in single, or multiple deliveries, and not for long-term outcomes, even in a general population.

I have discussed, in previous articles, the concerns surrounding the recommendation of a pharmaceutical product to healthy pregnant women despite the lack of any general population studies. Here are some of my major gripes and reasons why you might want to reject the flu vaccine in pregnancy:

• Safety
• Closer review of the vaccine “safety studies” including this recent claim that the flu vaccine was not associated with low birth weight, reveals outcomes that are compromised by insufficient statistical power (small studies), short-term assessment periods, exclusion of fetal losses in analyses, incomplete control of confounding variables (that can raise incidence rates of bad outcomes in both groups), lack of laboratory confirmation of influenza, and focus on gross outcomes such as preterm birth rather than longer term neurodevelopmental.
• Multiexposure
• The flu vaccine is prepared with egg proteins and associated unidentified viral DNA from this animal tissue, the allergen gelatin, polysorbate 80 which crosses the blood brain barrier, the carcinogen formaldehyde, the detergent triton x100, sucrose, resin, the antibiotic gentamycin, and thimerosol/mercury. Double talk of mercury exposure in pregnancy (don’t eat sushi, get your vaccine!) is only one glaringly egregious example of the CDC’s selective neglect of peer-reviewed published literature demonstrating profound harm associated with this neurotoxic metal.Mercury-containing vaccines are offered to pregnant women despite evidence as recent as last month which linked vaccine-related exposure to autism spectrum disorders. The unstudied role of these ingredients is compounded by the genome-altering effects of unquantified viral DNA from the cross-species preparation of this product. Multiple exposures through different vaccine preparations have never been studied, despite accumulating evidence of synergistic toxicity, mortality, and risk associated with other pregnancy-related vaccines such as DTaP.

• Inflammation
• Perhaps the most concerning study I have come across implicated the influenza vaccination in a strong inflammatory response in pregnant woman. Here, the investigators identified significantly elevated CRP two days after vaccination and a similar (but non-significant) pattern for TNF-alpha. They address the notion of vulnerable subgroups as being more important than generalizable findings. For example, the most depressed women at the time of vaccination exhibited an increased inflammatory response to vaccination – suggestive of inflammatory priming by the depressed state or an impairment of the inflammatory attenuation that is typical of a pregnant state. Stating that this inflammation is preferable to that of a flu virus infection is hand waving assumption, and is guaranteeing an inflammatory response in a woman who may very well have been otherwise unaffected.
• Fear-mongering
• Inflated risks of the flu in the pregnant population are the basis for aggressive propaganda. As Ayoub and Yazbak state:

“In general, most symptoms of the “flu” are not caused by influenza virus but by a variety of noninfluenza viruses, bacteria, other infectious organisms, or even noninfectious conditions. According to the CDC, only about 20% of the cases of ILI are actually caused by the influenza virus. If this is true, then theoretically only 20% of all cases of ILI are preventable by influenza vaccination, and only when there is a perfect antigenic match between the vaccine strain and the circulating virus. Furthermore, even a perfect antigenic match does not guarantee an adequate antibody titer, nor does measurable antibody assure protection.”

• Efficacy
• A Cochrane analysis of 50 studies (15 of which were industry funded) demonstrated that in the likely event that the included strains did not match circulating virus, there was a 2% incidence of presumed influenza in the unvaccinated population as opposed to a 1% incidence in the vaccinated. There was no effect of vaccination on hospitalizations for complications. This review also acknowledges an increased incidence of Guillain-Barre Syndrome (autoimmune paralysis) associated with vaccination. A Canadian study found that subjects who had received the regular trivalent influenza vaccine the previous season were more susceptible to subsequently contracting the pandemic H1N1 in 2009/2010.

This Committee Not Only Feels Comfortable Discarding These Concerns but Also Ignores the Following:

A 116 fold increase in fetal demise during the two-vaccine flu season of 2009/2010: H1N1 and seasonal products.

In a breathtaking paper entitled, Comparison of VAERS fetal-loss reports during three consecutive influenza seasons: Was there a synergistic fetal toxicity associated with the two-vaccine 2009/2010 season? Goldman does what we would hope our impartial governing medical bodies might have. He assesses the shortcomings of our passive reporting system – the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) – and uses validated statistical methodology to confirm the danger associated with multiple vaccines in pregnancy.

Clearly, as a perinatal practitioner, I have concerns with even one vaccine administration in pregnancy; however, that women in 2009 were subject to a completely and entirely unstudied combo pack of interventions, the package insert of which clearly states,

“It is also not known whether these vaccines can cause fetal harm when administered to pregnant women or can affect reproduction capacity”

Goldman, the researcher and author of the aforementioned study, determined the following:

• Spontaneous abortion (miscarriage) and still birth rates determined to be proximally associated to vaccine delivery were analyzed by Moro et al for the flu seasons of 1990-2009 finding 1.9/million or an average incidence of 1.2 per year.
• From this average to the first 5 months of the 2009/10 season in which women were recommended to receive both the typical flu vaccine and the H1N1, there were 57/million fetal losses reported.
• Using a capture-recapture statistical tool that allows for researchers to control for the inherent limitations of a reporting system, 174 cases from VAERS and 67 cases from NCOW were pooled to identify an ascertainment-corrected rate of 1/1695 (590/million). This adjustment reflects the fact that VAERS is a gross underestimation of the actual incidence of adverse events – in this case representing only 13% of the vaccine-related fetal losses.

Goldman then discusses how initial underreporting can influence further underreporting:

“Because both patient and health care professionals relied on a historical profile that was incomplete with respect to assessing fetal-demise reporting, a possible link to fetal demise following administration of influenza vaccine/vaccines during 2009/2010 was rarely contemplated or was considered highly unlikely and thus, more often than not, not reported.”

This 4250% increase in fetal deaths was known to the CDC and did not trigger any reparative action. We have a committee comprised of pharmaceutically-invested “experts” telling doctors what to do with their patients. The transparency of the no-citizen-left-behind agenda is never more apparent than in the fact that you can engage this potentially lethal medical intervention (yes, death is a known and documented potential side effect) at your local CVS. Long gone are the days of informed consent.

Find Your Inner Compass

This information certainly calls at minimum for “further study” if not a complete and total halt to the current perinatal recommendations. It’s time to take a step back, as citizens, and take a long, hard look at what is happening to our health as a population. It’s time to appreciate that our doctor’s recommendations are influenced by companies who engage repeatedly in criminal behavior, and who refuse to acknowledge any role for lifestyle, diet, and individual genetics in infectious disease.

Don’t wait for the too little too late DES and thalidomide style recalls, decades after the fact. You have the power to reclaim your pregnancy, understand natural support of immunity, and handily dismiss obstetrical bullying by seeking out a like-minded provider. Take back your maternal compass. It’s telling you to steer clear of this needle.

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