The CDC has for years claimed that the flu kills 36,000 Americans a year; the major media unquestioningly repeated this number even though researchers said it was false. Now the CDC says flu kills as few as 3,500 Americans in some years, with an average of 23,000 per year overall. Those numbers are still too high because the CDC loves to call all winter deaths “flu.” But they don’t do lab tests to confirm the diagnoses.
This kind of dishonesty was revealed last year when the H1N1 flu was found to be bogus – so the CDC told health departments to just call all flu H1N1 so the numbers would look good. After all you can’t have a “deadly pandemic” if no one is dying from it. It makes the people who purchased a few $billion of vaccines look good if they can show they “saved” us. (15)
According to a study in the British Medical Journal the flu is directly responsible for only a few hundred American deaths in most years with an average of 1,348 deaths in a really bad year. Is this a serious problem in a nation of over 300,000,000 people? (16)
Fortunately the American public can’t always be fooled since about 70% of us did not get a flu shot last year.
References:
15. Thompson WW, Moore MR, Weintraub E et al. Estimating influenza-associated deaths in the United States. Am J Pub Health. 2009;99:S225--30.
16. Doshi P. Are US flu death figures more PR than science? 2005;331:1412. doi:10.1136/bmj.331.7529.1412 (Published 8 December 2005)
