Flu Facts: Annual Deaths
Now that flu season is upon us, the sick care industry is inundating us with the annual rollout of ads from pharmacies, and news soundbites from “the experts” telling us to run out there and get our flu shots because they are our best option for preventing the flu. Mainstream media will run stories on some “perfectly healthy” person who got the flu and died to stir up the emotional juices trying to scare us into compliance.
But how many people actually die from the flu, and how effective are these flu shots which are our best, and seemingly only, option to protect us from this scourge?
I am not a doctor or expert, and am certainly not doling out advice or recommendations. This is simply information that you can choose to ignore, or use as a jumping off point to dig deeper into a topic which isn’t as straightforward as we are led to believe.
From my post 120 Years of Conventional Medicine, Part 1, I covered a few infectious diseases for which vaccines have been created that have supposedly been the lifesaving elixirs we frail humans need to survive this wild world. Influenza happened to be one of those diseases and here are the numbers.
Mortality data sources: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/vsus.htm & https://wonder.cdc.gov/Deaths-by-Underlying-Cause.html
As you can see, the flu vaccine was not widely distributed to the public until the mid-1980s by which time death from flu was almost non-existent. Influenza is a bit of a catchall term and is listed as cause of death even when an actual flu virus is not identified. Sounds like another disease we recently encountered.
So what do annual deaths from the flu look like. I’m using 2018 as an example to remove any possibility of influence from the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Here is a screen shot from the CDC of “influenza” deaths from 2018:
According to the CDC's own data, there were only 61 deaths related to influenza due to avian flu virus with no other disease manifestations in 2018. The other classifications involved other disease manifestations such as pneumonia or other respiratory issues.
Now, one could argue that the flu led to these additional disease manifestations, but unless we examine the actual medical records, these patients could have had these other conditions prior to the flu. Also, can we really claim influenza when a virus was not identified as is the case with almost half of the supposed 11,000+ deaths?
When stratified by age, close to 80% (8,674 to be exact) of these supposed influenza deaths occurred in the 65+ age bracket. Almost 4,500 of these deaths occurred in the 85+ age bracket.
To put influenza mortality into perspective, these 11,000+ influenza deaths represent a whopping 0.39% of total deaths in 2018. Influenza apparently deserves much more grand attention and intervention than a condition like septicemia, which you are 3.5 times more likely to die from than influenza. Over 40,000 people died of septicemia in 2018.
But, you may argue, the reason we don’t have as many flu deaths is because we are dutifully getting our annual shots. To which I would reply, refer to the chart above regarding influenza deaths, and read my next post on the effectiveness of our “best option” flu shots.