Source: www.naturalnews.com

As someone with a good deal of education in scientific thinking and the scientific method, I have put considerable effort into attempting to find any real scientific evidence backing the widespread use of influenza vaccines (flu season shots). Before learning about nutrition and holistic health, I was a computer software entrepreneur, and I have a considerable scientific background in areas such as astronomy, physics, human physiology, microbiology, genetics, anthropology and human psychology. One of my most-admired thought leaders is, in fact, the late physicist Richard Feynman.

I don't speak from a "scientific" point of view on NaturalNews very often because it's often a dry, boring presentation style. But I do know the difference between real science and junk science, and I find examples of junk science in both the "scientific" side of things as well as the "alternative" side of things.

For example, so-called "psychic surgery," as least in the way it has been popularized, is nothing more than clever sleight-of-hand where the surgeon palms some chicken gizzards and then pretends to pull diseased organs out of the abdominal cavity of some patient. The demonstrations I've seen on film are obvious quackery.

Similarly, flu season vaccines are mainstream medicine's version of psychic surgery: It's all just "medical sleight of hand" based on nothing more than clever distractions and the obfuscation of scientific facts. Flu season shots, you see, simply don't work on 99 out of 100 people (and that's being generous to the vaccine industry, as you'll see below).

A year ago, I offered a $10,000 reward to any person who could find scientific proof that H1N1 vaccines were safe and effective (http://www.naturalnews.com/027985_H...). No one even made a claim to collect that reward because no such evidence exists.

Conventional medicine, they say, is really "Evidence-Based Medicine" (EBM). That is, everything promoted by conventional medicine is supposed to be based on "rigorous scientific scrutiny." It's all supposed to be statistically validated and proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that it works as advertised. And in the case of flu vaccines, they are advertised as providing some sort of absolute protection against influenza. "Don't miss work this flu season. Get a flu shot!" The idea, of course, is that getting a flu shot offers 100% protection from the flu. If you get a shot, they say, you won't miss work from sickness.

This implication is wildly inaccurate. In fact, it's just flat-out false. As you'll see below, it's false advertising wrapped around junk science.

You see, there was never an independent, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study proving either the safety or effectiveness of the H1N1 swine flu vaccines that were heavily pushed last year (and are in fact in this year's flu shot cocktail). No such study has ever been done. As a result, there is no rigorous scientific basis from which to sell such vaccines in the first place.

To try to excuse this, vaccine hucksters claim that it would be "unethical" to conduct a placebo-controlled study of such vaccines because they work so well that to deny the placebo group the actual vaccine would be harmful to them. Everybody benefits from the influenza vaccine, they insist, so the mere act of conducting a scientifically-controlled test is unethical.

Do you smell some quackery at work yet? This is precisely the kind of pseudoscientific gobbledygook you might hear from some mad Russian scientist who claims to have "magic water" but you can't test the magic water because the mere presence of measurement instruments nullifies the magical properties of the water.

Similarly, vaccine pushers often insist it's unethical to test whether their vaccines really work. You just have to "take it on faith" that vaccines are universally good for everybody.

Yep, I used the word "faith." That is essentially what the so-called scientific community is invoking here with the vaccine issue: Just BELIEVE they work, everybody! Who needs scientific evidence when we've got FAITH in vaccines?

Forget about evidence-based medicine. Forget about any rational cost-benefit analysis. Forget about the risk-to-benefit ratio calculations that should be part of any rational decision making about vaccines. No, the vaccine industry (and its apologist bloggers) already know that vaccines are universally good for you, therefore no such rigorous scientific assessment is even required!

The Scientific Method, in other words, doesn't really apply to the things they already believe in. Faith can override reason in the "scientific" community, if you can believe that! What's next, are they going to claim vaccines work because some sort of "vaccine God" makes them work?

Here, take your vaccine shot. And don't forget to pray to the Vaccine God because that's how these things really work. Vaccine voodoo, in other words. (Hey, that would have been a great title for the vaccine song, come to think of it...)

Unethical to find out if they work?

I got to wondering about the whole explanation of how it would be "unethical" to test whether the H1N1 vaccines actually work. This deflection strikes me as particularly odd, because it comes with an implied follow-up statement. Here's what they're actually saying when they invoke this excuse:

#1) It is "unethical" to conduct placebo-controlled studies on seasonal flu vaccines to find out if they actually work.

#2) But at the same time, it is entirely ethical to give these shots to hundreds of millions of people, even while lacking any real evidence that they are safe or effective.

In other words, it's unethical to conduct any real science, but entirely ethical to just keep injecting people with a substance that might be entirely useless (or even harmful). That's just a hint of the kind of warped logic and failed ethics that typify our modern vaccine industry.

Vaccine advocates claim that H1N1 vaccines are so effective that NOT giving vaccines to a placebo group would "put their lives at risk." That alone is apparently enough reason to avoid conducting any real science on these vaccines.

But I'm not buying this. I think it's just a cover story -- an excuse to avoid subjecting such vaccines to rigorous scientific inquiry because, deep down inside, they know vaccines would be revealed as an elaborate medical fraud.

So I poked around to see if there were other randomized studies being conducted that might actually put people's lives at risk. It didn't take long to find some. For example, the New England Journal of Medicine recently published two studies regarding post heart-attack patient cooling which seeks to minimize brain damage by physically lowering the temperature of the brain of the heart attack patient until they can reach the acute care technicians at a nearby hospital.

In two studies, researchers who already knew that "cooling" would save lives nevertheless subjected 350 heart attack patient to a randomized study protocol that assigned comatose (but resuscitated) patients to either "cooling" temperatures or normal temperatures.

In one study, while half the cooled patients recovered with normal brain function, only a quarter of those exposed to normal temperatures did. In other words, patient cooling saved their brains. And yet the importance of knowing whether or not this procedure really worked was apparently enough to justify withholding the treatment from over a hundred other patients, most of whom suffered permanent brain damage as a result.

You see, when scientists really want to know the answers to questions like, "Does this brain cooling work?" they have no qualms about subjecting people to things like permanent brain damage in a randomized clinical trial. The knowledge gained from such an experiment is arguably worth the loss of a few patient brains because, armed with scientific evidence, such procedures can be rolled out to help save the brains of potentially hundreds of thousands of patients in subsequent years.

But when it comes to testing vaccines like the recent H1N1 variety, the official explanation is that it's too dangerous to withhold vaccines from a treatment group. They say it's not really important to determine if vaccines are statistically validated, and it's not worth the "risk" of withholding vaccines from anyone in a randomized clinical trial.

Now, sure, there have been some clinical trials done on many different vaccines over the years, but most of those are industry funded, and there are almost never rigorous trials conducted on each year's seasonal flu vaccines before they are released for public consumption. As a result, each year's vaccine is a brand new experiment, carried out across the guinea pig masses of patients who just do whatever they're told without questioning whether it's backed by real science.

Because, of course, it isn't. And I'm not the only one who recognizes this inconvenient fact.