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In a recent article highlighting a review of 50 years’ worth of data, Dr. Tom Jefferson explained why flu cases are rare, complications from flu are very rare and there have been no deaths from influenza.  “Vaccines do not stand a chance against a relatively rare moving target like influenza,” he said.

Dr. Jefferson has been publishing ‘The Dot Series’ of articles on the Substack page ‘Trust the Evidence’.  The Dot Series started as a project to publish “downloads” of work Dr. Jefferson and his colleagues on influenza vaccines.  It received substantial feedback.  Consequentially, the series morphed into summarising the back story of four Cochrane reviews which show poor performance of influenza vaccines.

At first, decision-makers brushed aside Cochrane and its systematic reviews to summarise and interpret the results of medical research.  However, by the 2000s, Cochrane became too prestigious to ignore.

In 2008 and 2009, Dr. Jefferson and his colleagues conducted reviews on the evidence the World Health Organisation, US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (“CDC”) and “the all-powerful” used for their flu vaccine recommendations.  It is the review of this evidence that has become the focus of The Dot Series.

The first article of this particular exposé is titled ‘Connecting the Dots’.  Unfortunately, it is behind a paywall and a subscription is needed to be able to read it.

In the second article, ‘Connecting More Dots’, Trust the Evidence noted: “US investigators at the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) recently published private email correspondence, which lays bare the extent of the deception. The emails have been made available.” 

“The emails show that you cannot trust even very big and famous institutions as they are part of the pandemic industry, but this is not a new story and we will show why this had become clear to us as early as 2008,” Dr. Jefferson wrote.

The following is the third part revealing the “evidence” used to recommend annual flu vaccinations.  “I beg all of you who were or will be offered an influenza vaccination to consider the content of this post when deciding whether to accept,” Dr. Jefferson began his article.

And concluded, “Influenza is rare … population interventions such as inactivated vaccines do not stand a chance against a relatively rare moving target like influenza.”

Exaggerating the Influenza Threat; Reflections of a long-time Cochrane reviewer

By Dr. Tom Jefferson

I beg all of you who were or will be offered an influenza vaccination to consider the content of this post when deciding whether to accept.

We have published posts presenting evidence that the influenza threat has been inflated, see: Revisiting the F Word, Trust the Evidence, 1 February 2023 (behind a paywall).

The US authorities knew that fraud was essentially taking place, and they bent over backwards to defend each other and cover up the scam, see: Connecting more Dots, Trust the Evidence, 23 October 2024.

Here’s the first part of the story of why I have suspected and then known about this for at least 25 years

In the mid-1990s, as the Cochrane Collaboration was starting, some of us in its Acute Respiratory Infection Group started writing protocols for Cochrane reviews on the topics that interested us (Cochrane being then a volunteer bottom-up organisation). 

In my case, it was influenza and other respiratory agents. So, we wrote protocols and published reviews on the effects (effectiveness and harms) of influenza vaccines (all types of inactivated and live attenuated) on children, adults, asthmatics, the elderly and those who care for the elderly. 

We initially looked only at randomised controlled trials and then bowed to pressure to include observational data. The latter were quickly ditched to preserve our sanity. That’s because observational data, in this case, told you everything and it’s opposite – not a new story.

I was eventually kicked out of the asthmatics review, but the other four were updated continually until we realised there was no point in going on, and 3 of the reviews were stabilised (no more updates). The three stabilised reviews are:

1. Demicheli V, Jefferson T, et al. Vaccines for preventing influenza in healthy adults. 2018

2. Jefferson T, Rivetti et al.  Vaccines for preventing influenza in healthy children. 2018

3. Demicheli V, Jefferson T et al. Vaccines for preventing influenza in the elderly. 2018

The fourth review is currently being updated:

4. Thomas RE, Jefferson T, et al. Influenza vaccination for healthcare workers who care for people aged 60 or older living in long-term care institutions. 

The reviews have been cited several thousand times and read many more times. They include data from 105 (real) placebo-controlled trials involving over 100,000 individuals. 

So that’s the background.  By this stage, you will be asking: So what? 

The “so what” is that randomised (real) placebo-controlled trials give you a good idea of the incidence of influenza (in the older trials, by a rise in antibody titres and or a viral positive culture isolate). When you pool the data together, you are not looking at one trial or dataset; you are looking at several data sets observed and recorded at the height of the “winter crisis” season. In the healthy adult’s review, the placebo arm picked up 465 cases out of 18,593 participants. So, of the folks with symptoms, 97.5% were not caused by influenza.  No trials were able to detect deaths, hospitalisations were relatively rare. The trials spanned 50 years of data, so we had all the highs, the lows and the maybes and even 2 influenza pandemics. 

Trials are studies where researchers can control things, verify and follow up on cases. The placebo arm incidence is essential for an accurate view of what is happening. Models are not required. Once we started looking at the verified influenza deaths in the placebo arm, we saw that the number of cases was in the hundreds. Complications were very rare; for deaths, we found zilch  – certainly not the figures put forward by the CDC, which not even Anthony Fauci believed. And this fits with the data we showed in the article ‘Connecting more Dots’ and ‘Revisiting the F Word’.

So, influenza is rare, loads more agents causing the same signs and symptoms are lumped under the appalling term “flu,” and population interventions such as inactivated vaccines do not stand a chance against a relatively rare moving target like influenza. So, you see my mummy was right when she used to say to me: “Tommy darling, never use the F word.”

In the next posts, Trust the Evidence will explain how and why inflating the threat is essential to keeping unethical bodies like the CDC and the UK Health Security Agency (“UKHSA”) going (I mention these two, but they are all at it) and analyse some misleading statements and policies based on deceptive and inflated data.

This post was written by an old geezer who’s been working on this for three decades and hopes that the content of posts like these will be his legacy.

Other relevant work

• Jefferson T, Di Pietrantonj C, Debalini M G, Rivetti A, Demicheli V. Relation of study quality, concordance, take home message, funding, and impact in studies of influenza vaccines: systematic review BMJ  2009;  338 :b354 doi:10.1136/bmj.b354
• Jefferson T. Influenza vaccination: policy versus evidence BMJ  2006;  333 :912 doi:10.1136/bmj.38995.531701.80
• Jefferson T, Di Pietrantonj C, Debalini MG, Rivetti A, Demicheli V. Inactivated influenza vaccines: methods, policies, and politics. J Clin Epidemiol. 2009 Jul;62(7):677-86. doi: 10.1016/j.jclinepi.2008.07.001. Epub 2009 Jan 4. PMID: 19124222.
• Doshi P. Are US flu death figures more PR than science? BMJ. 2005 Dec 10;331(7529):1412. 
• Doshi P. Influenza: marketing vaccine by marketing disease BMJ  2013; 346 :f3037 doi:10.1136/bmj.f3037

About the Author

Tom Jefferson is a clinical epidemiologist and a Senior Associate Tutor at the University of Oxford.  Together with Professor Carl Heneghan, he publishes articles on a Substack page titled ‘Trust the Evidence’.