By Amanda Froelich Truth Theory
The vaccine debate has officially become more complicated, now that a study published in the prestigious journal Vaccine has concluded that women who receive two flu shots in successive seasons are nearly 8x more likely to have spontaneous abortions, also known as miscarriages. Despite the gravity of this finding, mainstream media — specifically the Washington Post — has attempted to downgrade the scientific study.
The study was conducted by researchers from the Marshfield Clinic, Kaiser Permanente, Group Health Research Institute, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This is the first study to take into account three important variables: 1) vaccines that contained the 2009 H1N1 flu virus strain, the virus that is responsible for the 2009 influenza pandemic; 2) the 28 days after vaccination; and 3) the impact(s) of repeated flu vaccinations over two successive seasons.
Based on the recorded data, it was determined that women who had a miscarriage were nearly twice as likely to have been vaccinated within the previous 28 days as women with full-time pregnancies. And, an additional analysis revealed that women who had a miscarriage were nearly eight times more likely to have been vaccinated with the H1N1-containing vaccines in the both the previous year and the same year of the miscarriage, compared to the women who did not vaccinate during their pregnancies.
“Among women who received pH1N1-containing vaccine in the previous influenza season, the aOR in the 1–28 days was 7.7 (95% CI 2.2–27.3); the aOR was 1.3 (95% CI 0.7–2.7) among women not vaccinated in the previous season,” says the study. An odds ratio implies two things are linked (such as tobacco use and lung cancer, for instance), which is why this correlation needs to be addressed by mainstream media outlets.
The researchers were quick to emphasize that the results may be just a chance finding — something that occurs when a number of similar studies are conducted. However, this is not the first study to suggest that health complications may arise from regular flu vaccinations. This study found the exact same flu vaccine/spontaneous abortion link when comparing the 2008-2009 to the 2009-2010 flu season.
This assessment shows that despite the CDC’s recommendation to vaccinate pregnant women, there is no science to support it. This study showed that mice infected with a seasonal influenza virus survived exposure to a “lethal influenza strain,” and that the vaccinated mice died. In this study, a team of highly respected Canadian scientist question the efficiency of the flu vaccine in general. They wrote, “Two research groups have recently reanalyzed the literature supporting influenza vaccination, including the vaccination of healthcare workers as a patient-safety measure.7,8 Both concluded that influenza vaccination is considerably less effective than is commonly accepted. These conclusions are not new: in 2007, Simonsen and colleagues 9 similarly challenged the results of published influenza vaccine efficacy studies involving elderly patients.9” And finally — though it is by far the last one, in this study, the promoted “benefits” of vaccinating the elderly is challenged.
For this most recent study, the researchers used data from the CDC-supported Vaccine Safety Datalink, a network established in 1990 to monitor vaccine safety. A second study to evaluate the risks of H1N1-containing vaccines causing miscarriages in early pregnancy is now being conducted, and it is funded by the CDC. Recent data from the Vaccine Safety Datalink will be used again.
Though the findings of the study published in Vaccine are controversial, it is heartening to know science is prioritizing vaccine safety. Said senior author Dr. Edward Belongia, a longtime vaccine researcher who heads the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Population Health at Wisconsin’s Marshfield Clinic, “I understand it’s disconcerting. It’s not a message that we welcome or want. But it is what we found, and we have an obligation to let people know about that.”
IMAGE CREDIT:subbotina / 123RF Stock Photo
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