Is the flu vaccine good or bad for you?

Posted: 10/17/2010
Last Updated: 1 hour and 20 minutes ago

PHOENIX - The nation faces tough questions in tough times, and there are people on both sides of every issue.
Arizona is no different. But who’s saying what about the issues important to Arizonans?

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This week we're tackling the debate over the influenza vaccine, and whether it’s good or bad for you.

Infectious disease specialist Meenal Patel, MD and infection preventionist Megan Durkin, MPH with Banner Boswell Medical Center say the benefit of getting the vaccine is not only to protect yourself, but also to protect those that you encounter. Patel and Durkin say even if you become ill despite receiving the vaccine, the severity of illness may be mitigated.
Katie Weisman, director of communications and public policy for Coalition for SafeMinds, says the blanket recommendation for influenza vaccination for the entire population is currently unsupported if the criteria are both safety and efficacy. According to SafeMinds.org, reliable evidence on influenza vaccines is thin.

So, is the influenza vaccine good or bad for you?
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Influenza vaccine raises significant concerns:

By Katie Weisman, director of communications and public policy for Coalition for SafeMinds

The question regarding influenza vaccine should not be whether it is good or bad for you, but rather whether it is both safe and effective. Since 2002, the Centers for Disease Control have rapidly expanded their recommendations for annual flu shots to now include the entire population. SafeMinds’ significant concerns with this policy are:

1. That the majority of flu shots in any given year (80-90%) still contain thimerosal, an ethyl-mercury preservative.

2. That research into efficacy has not shown the major benefits in all populations that one would assume based on CDC recommendations, especially for pregnant women, infants and children.

I will briefly try to summarize our concerns.

The majority of the public mistakenly believes that the mercury has been removed from all influenza vaccines when, in fact, only flu vaccines produced in single-dose syringes are typically thimerosal-free.

A second fallacy is that the amount of mercury in flu vaccines is so small that it is insignificant. If this were true, then leftover flu vaccines would not qualify as hazardous waste. Typical mercury-containing flu shots have a concentration of 50 parts per million mercury which is 250 times the EPA’s standard of 0.2 parts per million. There are multiple studies showing toxic effects on immune and nerve cells, using mercury blood levels that are easily induced by a single mercury-containing vaccine.

These studies are particularly concerning in their implications for fetuses and young children due to their low body weight and poor ability to detoxify heavy metals.

Background mercury levels in the blood of the US population are rising as evidenced by the CDC’s NHANES results. Our mercury exposures through dental amalgam, fish consumption and emissions from coal-fired power plants are already significant. Given data that mercury appears to concentrate in cord blood, EPA estimates that as many as 1 in 6 women of childbearing age already has a mercury blood level that potentially puts her fetus at risk of neurological injury. Adding more mercury to this load through flu shots is illogical.

Even in those 7 states that have passed laws against giving mercury-containing vaccines to pregnant women and young children, the protection is not adequate since the laws are waived when a public health “emergencyâ€