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Sleep News Blog

Prescription Sleep Medicine

What You Must Know About the Pneumococcal Vaccine

Posted by sleepyguy in Prescription Sleep Medicine, Sleep Disorder on May 07th, 2009

The CDC, hospitals and doctor’s offices around the country are intent on pushing the pneumococcal vaccine as a safe and effective way to reduce the burden of pneumonia on society. It’s touted as being especially important for the elderly population to get this vaccine, as they are not only more prone to GET pneumonia, but more prone to dying from it or becoming critically ill.

Pneumococcal pneumonia is also one of the main complications of flu infection. People RARELY die of the flu itself, but most often die of COMPLICATIONS from the flu. And they most often die of pneumonia. So, naturally, it would be a great idea to get the widely available vaccine in order to prevent pneumonia, right?

But a new study says it “does not appear to actually be effective in preventing pneumonia”.

Not effective in preventing pneumonia?!

Importantly, this study was done as a “metanalysis”. A metanalysis is a study that is done to look at all of the studies that have been done on the subject in order to get a “big picture” view of the results of all the studies combined. This is very important because individual studies may be biased, be very small or have other problems. A metanalysis takes all this into account. They dismiss studies that have major flaws and generally only look at high quality studies.

In this case 21 studies were examined with a total of over 100,000 test subjects. And the conclusion was that the pneumococcal vaccine doesn’t work. Yet hospitals across the country spend millions of dollars unnecessarily in order to follow the regulations issued by the CDC that push these vaccines that contain “preservatives” like mercury, formaldehyde and coal tar.

Along with the equally questionable flu vaccine, hundreds of thousands of people- particularly the elderly -are pushed to get large amounts of these “preservatives” injected into their bodies for the sake of the virtually nonexistent benefit of reducing their incidence of disease!