The Vaccination Industry has had a long, successful and extremely
profitable run vaccinating seniors with NO evidence of any benefit to
anyone but themselves.

http://ilenarose.blogspot.com
Health Lover

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/83454.php

The mortality benefits of giving elderly people the flu vaccine have
been vastly overstated, according to a Review published in The Lancet
Infectious Diseases, October edition. Vaccinating people over 65
against influenza in developed countries is aimed at reducing the flu
mortality burden.

Dr Lone Simonsen, George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA
and team say that vaccinating not-so-frail elderly people more
frequently than their frail peers, plus the use of non-specific
endpoints, such as all-cause mortality, are the reasons for this
exaggeration.

"The remaining evidence base is currently insufficient to indicate the
magnitude of the mortality benefit, if any, that elderly people derive
from the vaccination program," say the authors.

Although placebo-controlled randomized trials have demonstrated that
the flu vaccine is effective in younger adults, a small number of
trials never included the elderly, especially those aged over 70.
About 75% of influenza related deaths occur among people aged 70 and
over, point out the authors.

These trials suggest that clinical gains and antibody responses in the
elderly fall with age after the age of 70.

Even though vaccination coverage rose from 15% in 1980 to 65% today,
there has been no confirmation of any influenza-related mortality
improvement since 1980, say the authors. "Paradoxically, whereas those
studies attribute about 5% of all winter deaths to influenza, many
cohort studies report a 50% reduction in the total risk of death in
winter - a benefit ten times greater than the estimated influenza
mortality burden."

The authors say that any future trial should use more precise
endpoints, for example, vaccine effectiveness against the highly
specific outcome of laboratory-confirmed influenza virus. Even though
such a trial would be more expensive and labor intensive, the vaccine
efficacy estimates are more likely to be reliable. Rather than use the
current arbitrary 4-month period, any future trial should also
identify the epidemic period for each season through utilization of
actual virus surveillance data.

The writers caution "While awaiting an improved evidence base for
influenza vaccine mortality benefits in elderly people, we suggest
that this group should continue to be vaccinated against influenza.
Influenza causes many deaths each year, and even a partly effective
vaccine would be better than no vaccine at all. But the evidence base
concerning influenza vaccine benefits in elderly people does need to
be strengthened."

"If current evidence points to substantial uncertainty, then what
next? Simonsen and colleagues suggest that 'refocusing on the likely
complications of immune senescence would require vigorous pursuit of
other options'. They also confront the ultimate taboo that drew so
much scorn in the evidence overview: doing randomized trials in
elderly people to settle the issue conclusively. That suggestion,
which seems to fly in the face of current policies, is in our opinion
the only ethical and scientific way to have definitive answer to the
question of whether or not current influenza vaccines protect elderly
people," Dr Tom Jefferson and Dr Carlo Di Pietrantonj, Cochrane
Vaccines Field, Alessandria, Italy, write in an accompanying Comment.