UK to Give Flu Vaccine to Every Child

The UK plans to give an annual influenza vaccination to every child. The stated purpose is to protect a different group, the elderly—but it’s the children who take the risks.

by Heidi Stevenson

With the stated purpose of protecting the old, not the children, the UK government plans to give the influenza vaccine to every child in the country every year. This is a £100 million boon to AstraZeneca, whose FluMist nasal vaccine will be used.

The purpose of this, other than to boost AstraZeneca’s profits, are questionable. As the BBC noted:

Children usually get a mild and sometimes unpleasant illness from seasonal flu. They rarely suffer complications. Youngsters who do are usually in the at-risk groups already offered a flu vaccine.

However, according to the BBC, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) suggests:

… the new strategy would avert a large number of flu cases among children as well as many severe cases and deaths, mostly among the elderly and others vulnerable to the infection.

In other words, the UK intends to have children face the risks of vaccination to protect the elderly!

FluMist, also known as Fluenz

FluMist, known as Fluenz in the UK, is a live attenuated vaccine delivered nasally. The risks are significant. What may be even more important is that, as a live vaccine, people who receive it shed the virus. That means they are infectious after getting the vaccine!

So how does this protect the elderly? If they aren’t in contact with a child, then there’s no risk of getting flu from them, so there’s no reason for the child to get the vaccine. If they are in contact with a child, then a recently vaccinated child would be likely to transmit the flu to them! This sounds more like a program intended to produce flu in the elderly!

To suggest that there’s no risk of such transmission from recently vaccinated children denies the experience of live attenuated polio vaccines. They were stopped in the US because the vaccine itself had become the primary source of polio. Of course, such concerns seem to be determined by who’s at risk, since live attenuated vaccines are the type being used in Africa and India. Of course, outbreaks of polio have followed their use.

Even worse, diseases mutated as a result of vaccines are sometimes known to be even more virulent. A case in point is the pertussis vaccine, which has resulted in a more virulent form of the disease, which is responsible for recent outbreaks.

It’s clear that this planned rollout of FluMist in the UK has not been thought through—except, apparently, in terms of profits. It’s acknowledged that this program will double the number of vaccinations children are given throughout childhood. That, of course, further increases the risks associated with vaccinations—a risk that has never been scientifically studied.

Estimates

The UK government estimates that the program to vaccinate every child every year for flu will save 2,000 lives and prevent 11,000 hospitalizations. Estimates! They don’t say how those estimates were made, and you can be fairly sure that they did not consider extra cases of flu from shedding.

Adverse Effects

Did they consider the potential risks of Guillain-Barré syndrome, which causes paralysis? This is expressly noted as a concern in the official document produced by AstraZeneca for FluMist. The document also points out:

In clinical trials, risks of hospitalization and wheezing were increased in children younger
than 2 years of age who received FluMist.

When you consider how carefully clinical trials are done by Big Pharma to evade exposing adverse effects, the fact that a clinical trial found that younger children are at risk of wheezing and hospitalization should ring alarm bells. But apparently, it didn’t.

Compromised Immunity

The AstraZeneca documentation also admits:

Data supporting the safety and effectiveness of FluMist administration in immunocompromised individuals are limited.

So, we have no idea how much risk this vaccine poses to children with compromised immune systems! When you consider that children with diabetes, asthma, arthritis, allergies, and a host of other conditions indicating compromised immune systems are at numbers that could now be vast majority of children, a mass FluMist vaccination rollout is idiocy of the highest order.

Since the vast majority of these vaccinations are to be given in schools, presumably as a routine measure with children lining up to get their doses, it seems highly unlikely that any consideration will be given to the immune status of any child—unless the parent is aware and proactively acts to prevent it.

Insanity

Although technically not compulsory, the reality is that parents are under tremendous pressure to vaccinate their children. GPs routinely fire them if they refuse. The government produces advertisements that stigmatize parents who refuse. Of course, the risks are virtually ignored, and when a child succumbs, the parents are routinely told that it was merely coincidence.

Nothing, though, can justify this increased danger being pushed on every child in the UK—and officially not particularly for their own benefit, but for that of the elderly, though the children suffer the risks of adverse effects and the elderly suffer the risk of disease from virus shedding.

We can be sure that the full array of risks has not been investigated, nor is there any semblance of a genuine scientific evidence base for the rollout of FluMist vaccination for every child every year.

One must wonder how much money and career promises were proffered to assure that virtually every child in the UK is vaccinated against a disease that is nearly always minor in them at the taxpayers’ cost. Can there possibly be another explanation for it?

 Photo of child is from MorgueFile.

Sources:

• Flu vaccine to be given to all UK children
• Flu vaccine to be give to all children in the UK
• Flu vaccines for all children
• UK backs AstraZeneca nasal flu vaccine for all kids
• AstraZeneca’s Highlights of Prescribing Information for FluMist

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