Posted 7 May 2020
HAVING THE FLU VACCINE MAY INCREASE YOUR RISK OF COVID-19 INFECTION.
A few of my friends in the last 24 hours have pointed me to a video called ‘Plandemic’. It is up there on YouTube for all to watch.
I have watched it a number of times. Let me copy here the initial response I gave to one of those friends:
“A very interesting interview. I know neither the interviewer or interviewee but interestingly, all of the highlighted ‘clips’ from frontline doctors included in the piece I have seen elsewhere. I have seen editorial on Fauci of exactly the same sentiment. I have seen the discourse around hydroxychloroquine. My ‘concerns’ about Bill Gates’ total World vaccination motives are also the stuff of nightmares. They are all pieces of the jigsaw I have seen elsewhere.
This video joins dots and joins them into a good narrative. So good that I realise as I watch, I am clinging on to my chair to stop being unwittingly dragged into a tribe of Conspiracy Theorists. So what do I let go of – the plausibility of the narrative or disbelief in conspiracies?”
Today my rational brain took over. I began to deconstruct the narrative of Plandemic hoping to find something on which to pin perspective. Maybe I was hoping to find something untrue, something exaggerated, something amiss. Maybe it would prove easier to disregard the narrative if I did.
Disturbingly, my first delve into the detail has been confirmatory of the narrative.
I refer to a paper published in January of this year. A study of 12,000 U.S.Armed Service personnel. You get a brief screenshot of the abstract of this study in the film. I have found the full paper within the archives of the National Institutes of Health and have now poured over the data.
The table of most interest is copied in the images.
Let me put the table in ‘English’. The study looked at Service personnel for the flu season of 2017/2018 and considered them according to whether they had received the seasonal flu vaccination or not. All personnel gave respiratory samples to the study team so that they could be assayed for the presence of viral and non viral infections. The table summarises the results.
The key column is the one labelled OR, ‘Odds Ratio’. This expresses as a single number whether the vaccinated subjects were more or less likely to show signs of the listed infection than the non-vaccinated group. An OR less than 1 indicates less likelihood of infection; an OR above 1 shows more likelihood. For example, for ‘Influenza A’ the Odds Ratio is 0.70 – the vaccinated group were less likely to test positive for an Influenza A infection than the non-vaccinated group.
You will notice that for all the Influenza strains, the ORs are all below 1: The vaccinated group were less likely to get a flu infection. And of course that is what you would expect for a flu vaccine! Otherwise it would be pretty pointless.
But look at the horizontally highlighted entry. Coronavirus. OR=1.36 You are more likely to develop a coronavirus infection if you received the flu vaccination for the 2017/18 flu season. The ‘p-value’ in the last column shows that this result was significant and not accountable from random variation alone. You are a third more likely to get a coronavirus infection if you received this flu vaccine.
Hypothesis: The elderly, type II diabetics, those on medications for chronic illnesses and NHS workers are seen as ‘high risk’ and are encouraged to have the flu vaccine each year. Has receiving the vaccine put them in the higher risk infection group for COVID-19?
Not all coronavirus infections are equal – some common colds are caused by coronavirus variants – and when this study was conducted there was no SARS CoV2 (or certainly it had not been identified). In the ‘normal’ world, my stated hypothesis should then prompt a follow-on study to test for SARS Cov2 in flu season 2019-2020. Perhaps we will never know!
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Just to add, I am not in any way anti-vaccine, and the study I reference here does show that the flu vaccine in 2017-18 was extremely effective at reducing total influenza infections in the test subjects.
In the long-run, influenza will still probably prove to be a bigger killer of people than coronavirus and so vaccination that reduces the incidence of influenza in the vulnerable will continue to be important.