Little-known Vaccine Court says a lot about the flu shot

[Silent_Bob]

http://sdnews.com/view/full_story/26983513/article-Little-known-Vaccine-Court-says-a-lot-about-the-flu-shot-?instance=update1

I'm probably beginning to sound like a broken record from 1934, but at least I play it only once a year. I actually prefer it that way, because this is the time of the season it means the most, especially to the friends and families puzzling over a crisis that sometimes evolves out of the best of intentions. Christmas brings with it a subset of raw emotions – and stories like this one are designed to propel those emotions to a higher level of awareness, the touchy nature of the topic notwithstanding.

Brianna Browning, a 9-year-old Houston girl, reportedly hasn't been able to see or move much of her body after receiving a flu shot on Oct. 15. The fourth-grader was hospitalized two days after vaccination and suffered vomiting spells and what appeared to be a seizure, according to her parents. Doctors allegedly don't yet know what happened or why, but Brianna's parents say their daughter's illness was caused by the vaccine.

That's an understandable judgment on the part of a loving and responsible mother and father – but truth be told, it's also embraced many times a year amid illness and death following administration of the vaccine. The number and strength of flu subtypes, the body's introduction to foreign substances through the vaccines, the criteria that determine the vaccine's potential harm, the gyrating statistics on the shot's relative effectiveness, flu activity in a given year (which right now is reportedly somewhat lighter than usual in the U.S.): The variables crazily abound, even as the Centers for Disease Control recommends flu shots for almost everyone over six months of age.


Lightly coloring the mix is legislation signed last June by California's Gov. Jerry Brown, dictating that the state's children are no longer allowed to skip the shots required to attend school because of their parents' religious or personal objections.

Enter a little-known federal body with a big fat name. It's called the Office of Special Masters of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, and it's known popularly as the Vaccine Court. It's charged with administering a no-fault system for sorting out vaccine injury claims, called the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, funded through a tax on vaccines.

A June 2015 Department of Justice report covering a three-month period that year seems to reflect that the flu vaccine is proportionally far from safe. Some 78 cases overall were awarded Vaccine Court settlements then, with 55 of the settlements granted for effects from the flu shot, including one death. Most of the settlements for injuries due to the flu shot were for Guillain-Barré Syndrome, a muscle disorder caused by damage to the nervous system. Other flu vaccine injuries included shingles, arthritis and Bell's palsy, a neural condition that causes one side of the face to droop.

Are the flu shot-related injuries exceedingly rare? Yeah, probably. But as with everything else, there's strength in numbers – numbers the CDC itself can't even cite on the other side of the ledger. Its own information says it's not aware of the number of yearly flu deaths, because states are not required to report individual seasonal flu cases or deaths of people older than 18 to the centers. Also, seasonal influenza is infrequently listed on death certificates of people who die from flu-related complications. One unrelated website says that the number of flu-related deaths each year can range anywhere from 3,000 to 49,000 – an unfathomable range amid the CDC's insistence that flu vaccines are safe.

I'll be 66 in February (I feel, act and look like I'm about 12 and a half), and that puts me in the "65-and-older" group the CDC especially urges to get the shot. Every year I ask my doctor if I should take the vaccine, and every year she emphatically says no. That's fortunate, because I've never gotten it, and, out of an abundance of caution, I never intend to. I've contracted an influenza strain a whopping one time in four decades (New Year's weekend of 1996, when I thought I was gonna die and wished I had at the time) – so it's clear I've dodged the flu through a God-given immune system rather than through a medication that fuels a roily annual controversy on the other side of the mainstream press.

Not everybody has my excellent health, but then again, not everybody requires it in order to stave the flu. And if worse comes to worst, the effects from influenza typically last one to two weeks – a potentially small price to pay against the uncertainty that surrounds the arguments that favor the shot. Mercury, for example, can poison the heart, brain and kidneys and is a preservative component of the vaccine; and providers insist that the vaccine is virtually mercury free today. So I guess we're supposed to ignore the fact that the levels were higher in the 40 years the vaccine's been around? Makes perfect sense to me, hey-tell.

What makes no sense is that Brianna Browning is very, very ill and that doctors either don't know or aren't stating the cause. There's certainly every chance that her shot isn't the cause of her sickness – but my money's on the figures from the Vaccine Court. Not only are they laughably more precise than those from the CDC; they're devoid of the inexorable big-pharma stigma, one that Brianna might never have a chance to survive.

Martin Jones Westlin is editor of La Jolla Village News.

[Free libertarian]

 Aren't we all supposed to be dead from ebola by now or was that the Asian bird flu?   Hard to keep track.

[Russell Kanning]

exactly .... all of those were supposed to kill us. Did the government recommend vaccines for any of those?

I don't trust these vaccines at all.