Fraudulent herbal immune supplement fails to reduce flu symptoms for 99 percent of people

Monday, December 20, 2010 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: herbal supplements, marketing fraud, health news

---

(NaturalNews) In an independent review published in a peer-reviewed medical journal (see below), a popular herbal immune supplement called "ImmunoFlu Remedy" was found to fraudulently marketed as a "flu prevention supplement." Its makers claim that if you take the supplement, you won't get the flu and won't miss a day of work during the flu season (a silly claim, eh?). But clinical testing recently revealed that ImmunoFlu Remedy only works to reduce flu symptoms on 1 out of every 100 people who take the supplement, meaning it is 99 percent ineffective.

An FTC spokesperson, commenting on the study results, characterized the marketing of ImmunoFlu Remedy as "obviously fraudulent" and a top FDA official has publicly promised to launch a criminal investigation into the makers of ImmunoFlu Remedy in order to "protect the public from misleading health claims." Evidence has also surfaced that ImmunoFlu Remedy may contain trace levels of heavy metals linked to neurological disorders. Over a dozen children admitted to emergency rooms at hospitals across the country have been identified as consumers of ImmunoFlu Remedy, and two of those children died. The makers of ImmunoFlu Remedy are being ordered to remove the product from their website and recall the product from distributors and retailers.

As shocking as all this sounds, there's something you need to know as you continue reading this story here on NaturalNews. There is no such thing as ImmunoFlu Remedy. This story is actually about seasonal flu vaccines.

Most of the details mentioned above, you see, are actually the true story about seasonal flu vaccines.

Flu vaccines don't work on 99 out of 100 people

Seasonal flu vaccines have been scientifically shown to reduce flu symptoms in only 1 out of every 100 people (they are ineffective on 99% of those receiving the shots) (https://www.naturalnews.com/029641_vaccines_j...). Flu vaccines also contain chemical ingredients linked to neurological disorders, which is why so many children in Australia and around the world have been admitted to hospital emergency rooms suffering from seizures and convulsions following flu shot injections (https://www.naturalnews.com/029586_Australia_...).

Seasonal flu vaccines are also fraudulently marketed with blatantly false claims that they prevent the flu in everyone who receives a shot. "Get the shot and you won't miss work" is one of the common claims made in flu shot promotions. Or, as Walgreens implies, "Get the shot and you won't infect your family members." That claim is blatantly misleading and scientifically false.

And yet, despite this fraudulent marketing of a product that doesn't work on 99% of those who take it, neither the FTC nor the FDA has taken any action against it. Marketers of flu vaccines, it turns out, can make any claims they wish, even if such claims are laughable in the face of scientific scrutiny.

Forget the science... we've got vaccines to sell!

Flu vaccines, you see, are immune from any real scientific scrutiny -- even by the scientific community. The mythology of season flu vaccines has been so pervasive and so widely described as "scientific" that the truth of whether it's really scientific no longer matters. Flu vaccines are simply assumed to work even without testing; without scientific evidence and without any legitimate application of skeptical thinking.

There's a word for that, of course. It's the word used to describe a system of belief that requires no evidence... a system in which truths are materialized out of lies through the mere act of enough authoritative people uttering falsehoods until they all begin to believe each other. That word, of course, is a four-letter word: Cult.

A cult need not answer to statistical scrutiny. It need not subject its own internal beliefs to outside review because everyone inside the cult already agrees on the answer -- and why ask questions when we already know the truth, right?

Such is the nature of the cult of flu vaccines. It's a large cult, of course, but the sheer size of the cult in no way detracts from the fact that it is a cult nonetheless. In other words, just because millions of doctors believe the propaganda of a cult does not make it any less of a cult. Even if all the doctors, pharmacists and drug pushers in the world fall for a fictitious belief and put their faith and professional reputations on the line in order to back that belief, it's still fiction. And it's still a cult.

Doctors once prescribed mercury and other poisons

There was a time in western medicine when doctors routinely prescribed mercury as a remedy to treat various afflictions. For example, mercury was frequently prescribed to treat syphilis.

In fact, one study describing the treatment of syphilis with "mercury inhalations" was presented at the Forty-Fourth Annual Session of the American Dermatological Association in Swampscott, Mass., June 2-4 in the year 1921. That study was entitled:

THE TREATMENT OF SYPHILIS BY MERCURY INHALATIONS
by H. N. COLE, M.D.; A. J. GERICKE, M.D.; TORALD SOLLMANN, M.D.
Arch Derm Syphilol. 1922;5(1):18-33.

Notice that the three authors were all MDs? That's because doctors have historically been some of the most persistent promoters of poisonous concoctions that today we would call "quackery." They even sought to destroy the careers and reputations of their own colleagues who pointed out that perhaps mercury should not be used as a medicine -- or even the idea that surgeons should wash their hands!

It is an historical fact that western doctors promoted the heavy metal mercury, highly addictive heroin, and other extremely toxic substances as "miracle cures" for all sorts of diseases and conditions. They also advocated cigarettes as being good for your health and even improving your teeth! (https://www.naturalnews.com/021949.html)

In fact, the term "quack" comes from the use of mercury by western doctors. Mercury, of course, was once called "quicksilver," and the term was bastardized into the derogatory "quack" to refer to physicians who continued to use dangerous substances that harmed patients. Under that definition, today's quacks are not homeopaths or herbalists but rather oncologists who poison their patients with chemotherapy in almost exactly the same way the quack doctors once poisoned their patients with mercury.

Flu vaccines are modern medicine's form of quackery

Based nothing more than wishful thinking and physicians quoting each other as reliable sources of expert opinion, the whole of evidence supporting flu vaccines today amounts to little more than an intellectual circle jerk of truly bad science.

Today's flu vaccine-pushing physicians, you see, are no smarter than their colleagues from the 1800's who prescribed mercury inhalations for patients. And they are arguably less wise, too. The only real difference is that today there are more of them and so their voices seem to take on the illusion of authority and consensus.

Consensus is not always fact. More often than not, it is merely the mass infection of many minds with official foolishness. At one time, after all, it was an established, consensus "fact" that the Earth was flat. More recently, even in 1847, a Hungarian obstetrician named Ignaz Semmelweis was viciously attacked by his colleagues for insisting that doctors should wash their hands before delivering babies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelwei...).

What Semmelweis discovered then is what every person who speaks out against the insanities of western medicine knows today: Western medicine is an arrogant, misinformed and dangerously ignorant system of control in which truth-tellers are routinely exterminated in order to maintain the mythologies upon which the medical industrial complex is based.

The truth about flu vaccines would destroy much of western medicine

Semmelweis was much like the Wikileaks of the 1840's in the sense that he revealed "uncomfortable truths" that challenged the status quo and made a whole lot of really important-sounding people look like fools. Since really important-sounding people don't enjoy looking like fools, they simply attack the messenger and increase their resolve to defend their ridiculous falsehoods and mythologies... even in the face of clear evidence that shows them to be wrong. Such is precisely the situation happening today with flu vaccines.

To challenge the sanctity of seasonal flu vaccines and the regimen of annual shots (which just happen to coincide with steady profits for the drug companies) is to question the very foundation of western medicine. Without the mythology of vaccines firmly imprinted in the minds of the people, western medicine would no longer appear to have authority over the flu. If flu vaccines were halted for just one year -- forcing people to turn to vitamin D instead -- the illusion of flu vaccines would be forever shattered and the people would realize that taking seasonal flu vaccine shots is just as ludicrous as inhaling mercury vapor.

That's why flu vaccines have to be incessantly pushed, each and every year, without any gaps in the "treatment."

The real quackery of vaccines

The evil genius in all this is that people have been tricked into believing in vaccines whether they work or not. When someone receives a vaccine shot, they consider themselves "protected" from the flu. So what happens if they get the flu anyway? They simply reason in their own heads that if they hadn't been vaccinated, they might have experienced far worse flu symptoms.

And if they don't get the flu at all? Then they reason that the vaccine prevented the flu! Thus, with the right programming, flu vaccines can be thought of as useful and effective regardless of the actual health outcome.

This is a classic red flag for a system of quackery. It's one of the most common complaints leveled against energy medicine by conventional scientists, in fact. They rightly point out that determining whether energy medicine really works for you is a guessing game: If you still get sick, you might think the energy medicine worked a little bit but not enough. If you don't get sick, then you might think the energy medicine worked like a miracle.

Such a logic matrix is prone to misinterpretation by patients and doctors alike. In both cases -- energy medicine as well as flu vaccines -- patients are likely to convince themselves that it's working, even if there is no real evidence that their belief is accurate. Belief itself, of course, is perhaps the best medicine of all, and it is a distinct possibility that the small number of patients who seem to be helped by flu vaccines (one percent) may be experiencing the benefit of the placebo effect.

Nevertheless, the way out of this puzzle is to subject flu vaccines (or energy medicine, similarly) to rigorous clinical trials in which a serious attempt is made to tease out some statistically significant answers such as "what percentage of people are actually helped by this treatment?"

What's really amazing about all this is that such clinical trials have already been done on flu vaccines, and the results are in: Seasonal flu vaccines prevent flu symptoms in about one percent of the people who receive vaccine jabs. And that's if you believe the more optimistic conclusions of the vaccine manufacturers themselves, by the way (https://www.naturalnews.com/029641_vaccines_j...).

How would this quackery be viewed if it were an herbal remedy?

From a scientific perspective, then, seasonal flu vaccines have roughly a one percent effectiveness rate, which means they have no apparent effect on 99 out of 100 people.

What's interesting about this is that if homeopathy, or energy medicine, or an herbal formula produced such poor results, it would be widely ridiculed as a quack remedy promoted via fraudulent marketing. A one percent effectiveness rate proves any "natural" remedy to be quackery, you see, and yet the same one percent effectiveness rate is more than sufficient to support the mythology of vaccines to those who believe the vaccine cult.

What it all comes down to is really this: Seasonal flu vaccines are really 1% science and 99% wishful thinking. And yet, apparently, that's more than enough reason for virtually the entire medical and scientific establishments to back seasonal flu vaccines as if they were scientifically proven while touting highly exaggerated marketing claims that imply one hundred percent effectiveness.

In any other industry, marketing a product that didn't work 99 percent of the time would be considered fraud. But in the vaccine industry? It's just business as usual.

How to make money selling a product that almost never works as advertised

The seasonal flu vaccine is a great money-making con, too. Imagine how much money you could make if you could convince hundreds of millions of people to buy a product that didn't work on 99 percent of your customers, and yet 100 percent of them were convinced that they were receiving benefits from it!

It's a pretty clever con, and it all depends on promoting the mythology -- or "catapulting the propaganda" as President George Bush famously said -- in order to make sure that 99 percent of the wishful thinking that powers the flu vaccine industry remains in place.

Because, let's face it: If flu vaccines actually worked, the industry really wouldn't need to advertise them so heavily, would they? If these vaccines really stopped flu infections with 100 percent effectiveness, word of mouth about flu vaccines would spread even faster than the flu itself, and virtually everyone would line up to get their "flu protection" shots out of sheer necessity.

The only reason the industry needs to engage in such aggressive flu vaccine promotion is because flu vaccines are only based on 1% science, and the other 99% of the marketing formula depends on keeping people brainwashed into believing the false mythology of flu vaccines.

Flu shots as placebo

Flu vaccines, in effect, are largely just placebo shots. If you think they're going to work for you, then you'll remain convinced of that regardless of whether you get sick or not. There wouldn't really be any harm in that except for the inconvenient fact that vaccine shots contain harmful chemical ingredients that pose a health risk to those who take them.

Thus, even while a flu vaccine may be providing as much as a 1% protection against the flu, it may simultaneously subject a person to a significantly smaller risk of a far more serious detrimental outcome: Neurological damage, convulsions, learning disabilities or even the accelerated development of Alzheimer's disease.

Are these risks really worth a 1-in-100 chance of preventing the flu? A rational answer seems to be no, they aren't. Especially when the available evidence says that vitamin D supplements work far better at preventing flu infections. And vitamin D can be taken with virtually no health risks whatsoever. Even better, vitamin D supplements are not formulated with mercury preservatives, chemical adjuvants or other questionable chemicals that are typically added to vaccines.

But don't expect this sort of rational, clear-thinking discussion of flu vaccines and vitamin D to be undertaken by your physician. Doctors have already drank the flu vaccine Kool-Aid, and as a result the science no longer matters to them. Even if Wikileaks released definitive documents showing the entire flu vaccine industry to be a complete scam based on fraudulent science, most doctors would no doubt continue to push flu vaccines anyway because that's what they've always done.

Doctors don't change course very often... especially not if they've participated as active members of the vaccine cult for several years (or decades). The likelihood of a doctor actually changing his mind on this issue of flu vaccines is even less than the likelihood of a flu vaccine preventing you from getting the flu this winter. And that likelihood is ridiculously low to begin with. So don't hold your breath. And don't hold out any faith for the idea that doctors will suddenly embrace scientific thinking, either. Because there's no room for truly scientific thought in the membership ranks of the vaccine cult.