Flu Vaccination Hysteria: A Manufactured Narrative Against Truth and Science

Flu Vaccination Hysteria: A Manufactured Narrative Against Truth and Science

The Sydney Morning Herald article by Angus Delaney, “This is not the record we want to be breaking: Anti-vax ideology helping to fuel flu case surge: GPs” (20 October 2025), reads like a propaganda leaflet for the pharmaceutical industry rather than responsible journalism. It uncritically parrots the claims of establishment GPs and the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP), dismissing valid scientific concerns about influenza vaccines as mere “anti-vax ideology.”

What it fails to do—deliberately—is examine the evidence. And the evidence is clear: influenza vaccines have never been proven in rigorous, placebo-controlled, long-term studies to be either safe or effective.

A Narrative Built on Fear

The article invokes record case numbers and blames declining vaccination rates, as though correlation equals causation. No acknowledgment is made of viral seasonality, testing biases, or the fact that influenza case counts often rise and fall for reasons completely independent of vaccination uptake.

Instead, the narrative is familiar: guilt, fear, and blame directed toward the growing number of Australians who—quite rightly—have lost trust in the vaccine establishment after the COVID-19 debacle. This erosion of blind faith is not “ideology.” It is reason. It is evidence. It is the public recognising that they have been misled for decades.

The Illusion of Effectiveness

Even the Cochrane Collaboration, the world’s leading authority on systematic evidence reviews, has consistently found the benefit of influenza vaccines to be weak at best. At most, annual vaccination reduces symptomatic cases by a tiny fraction, and in many years it fails outright due to mismatched strains (Jefferson et al., 2018). Effectiveness against transmission is virtually nonexistent.

Yet the RACGP demands more uptake, without once disclosing the poor performance of the product. This is not medicine. It is marketing.

The Reality of Harm

Far from being “safe,” influenza vaccines carry a significant burden of adverse events. These include:

• Mild reactions: fever, muscle aches, headaches, fatigue, and injection site pain.

• Severe allergic reactions: including anaphylaxis.

• Neurological damage: Guillain–Barré Syndrome has long been associated with influenza vaccination (Haber et al., 2004; CDC, 2019).

• Autoimmune complications: flare-ups of pre-existing conditions, and reports of neurological regression in children.

• Cardiovascular and inflammatory disorders: myocarditis, vasculitis, and immune-mediated damage.

• Death: though routinely dismissed by authorities, fatal events following flu vaccination are reported every year in surveillance systems such as The US VAERS.

For babies and young children—the very “sensitive” cohort the RACGP claims to protect—these injections are not just unnecessary, they are reckless.

Antigen Overload and Immune Suppression

Repeated annual vaccination exposes the immune system to artificial antigens, adjuvants, and preservatives. This contributes to antigen overload, which can dysregulate immune function and paradoxically increase susceptibility to other respiratory infections (Cowling et al., 2012). Instead of strengthening immunity, the process definitely weakens it—trapping individuals in a cycle of dependency.

Typical Ingredients / Excipients in Influenza Vaccines in Australia

According to product information sheets and published summaries, influenza vaccines may contain:

• Inactivated influenza virus antigens (haemagglutinin from influenza A and B strains)

• Buffers and salts (e.g., potassium chloride, monobasic potassium phosphate, dibasic sodium phosphate, sodium chloride, calcium chloride, magnesium chloride) Healthcare Australia+1

• Residuals/allergens from manufacturing: egg protein (ovalbumin) in egg-based vaccines, traces of antibiotics (e.g., gentamicin, kanamycin, neomycin) in some products. Healthcare Australia+1

• Preservatives/adjuvants/other excipients: e.g., formaldehyde, cetrimonium bromide (CTAB) in some older vaccine lines, polysorbate 80, sucrose, sometimes adjuvants in older formulations. Healthline+1

• Water for injections and manufacturing residual components.

How influenza vaccines are made

• Most seasonal influenza vaccines are produced by growing the influenza virus in fertilised chicken eggs. After harvesting, the virus particles are inactivated (killed) and purified to extract haemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA) antigens.

• A smaller number of vaccines are produced using cell-based systems (e.g., MDCK cells — Madin-Darby Canine Kidney cells, which are animal, not human) or recombinant DNA technology (insect cells, such as Sf9 fall armyworm cells).

• Human embryonic cell lines (such as MRC-5 or WI-38, originally derived from foetal lung tissue in the 1960s) are not used in the production of influenza vaccines. These are more relevant to a few other vaccines (e.g., some rubella, varicella, or hepatitis A vaccines).

Ingredients in influenza vaccines

Typical influenza vaccines may contain:

• Active components: purified haemagglutinin surface proteins from influenza A & B viruses.

• Residuals: egg protein (ovalbumin), formaldehyde, antibiotics (gentamicin, neomycin, kanamycin), polysorbate 80, sucrose, and salts/buffers.

• Adjuvants (in some products, e.g., Fluad Quad): MF59 (squalene oil emulsion).

The Alternative: Natural Immunity and Early Treatment

The best way to prevent serious outcomes from influenza is not through yearly injections but through:

• Natural immunity, which provides broad and durable protection unmatched by any vaccine.

• Nutritional sufficiency, especially vitamin D, which has been shown to dramatically reduce the risk and severity of respiratory infections (Martineau et al., 2017).

• Early treatment protocols using safe, repurposed medicines, which the establishment continues to ignore or suppress.

These are inexpensive, safe, and scientifically sound measures—yet they never receive equal airtime in mainstream outlets.

Vaccines as Dinosaurs

In a healthier, wiser world, vaccines will be seen for what they are: crude, outdated interventions that belong in the museum of medical history. Public health will focus instead on strengthening resilience through nutrition, lifestyle, sanitation, and early therapeutics—not through injecting toxins into infants and the elderly year after year.

The RACGP and media mouthpieces may rail against “anti-vax ideology,” but what they call ideology is actually evidence-based skepticism. The public has every right—indeed, a duty—to question medical interventions that are marketed more aggressively than they are studied.

Conclusion

The SMH article is not journalism. It is public relations for the pharmaceutical industry, dressed up as health advice. It shames the public for exercising discernment, dismisses legitimate scientific concerns as conspiracy, and promotes an unsafe and ineffective product.

Australians deserve better. They deserve truth. They deserve genuine prevention. And they deserve to know that influenza vaccination is not the solution—it is part of the problem.

References

• Jefferson, T., Rivetti, A., Di Pietrantonj, C., Demicheli, V., & Ferroni, E. (2018). Vaccines for preventing influenza in healthy adults. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, (2), CD001269.

• Doshi, P. (2013). Influenza: marketing vaccines by marketing disease. BMJ, 346, f3037.

• Haber, P., DeStefano, F., Angulo, F. J., Iskander, J., Shadomy, S. V., Weintraub, E., & Chen, R. T. (2004). Guillain–Barré Syndrome following influenza vaccination. JAMA, 292(20), 2478–2481.

• Cowling, B. J., Fang, V. J., Nishiura, H., et al. (2012). Increased risk of noninfluenza respiratory virus infections associated with receipt of inactivated influenza vaccine. Clinical Infectious Diseases, 54(12), 1778–1783.

• Martineau, A. R., Jolliffe, D. A., Hooper, R. L., et al. (2017). Vitamin D supplementation to prevent acute respiratory tract infections: systematic review and meta-analysis of individual participant data. BMJ, 356, i6583.

• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). (2019). Guillain–Barré Syndrome and vaccines.

The Age Article

‘This is not the record we want to be breaking’: Anti-vax ideology helping to fuel flu case surge: GPs

Angus DelaneyOctober 20, 2025 — 12.02pm

Australian GPs are sounding the alarm over a record-breaking flu season they attribute in part to a rise in anti-vaccination sentiment, fuelled by social media and, they say, the White House.

This ideological wave, which gained momentum during the COVID-19 pandemic, has contributed to a drop in flu vaccinations across almost all age groups, even as confirmed flu cases have soared past previous all-time highs.

There have been more than 410,000 confirmed cases of the flu across the country in 2025 so far – more than the previous all-time high of 365,000 in 2024 – and about 1.5 per cent of the population.

It comes as flu vaccination rates decline across almost all age groups, with doctors particularly concerned for the vulnerable six-month to five-year-old cohort and the 65-plus group, with only 25.7 per cent and 60 per cent having received the vaccine respectively.

“This is not the record we want to be breaking, we must boost vaccinations rates and reverse this trend,” said Royal Australian College of GPs (RACGP) president Dr Michael Wright.

Dr Rebekah Hoffman, a GP and chair of the RACGP, said decreasing vaccinations rates was partly because of a rising number of vaccine sceptics.

“I think there’s cohorts of people that [are on] social media at the moment [who] aren’t particularly pro-vaccination, that are worried, that are scared, that think that vaccinations are a bad thing,” she said. “And I think that we probably need to do a bit of an education piece around the safety of the vaccine.”

The anti-vax movement gained ground during the pandemic when the COVID-19 vaccine became mandatory for many frontline workers. Data released by UNICEF in 2023 shows Australians’ confidence in vaccinates dropped 7.5 percentage points from 93.8 per cent before the pandemic to 86.3 per cent in 2021-22.

Hoffman also said anti-vaccine sentiment from the Trump administration – including from health secretary and vaccine critic Robert F. Kennedy Jr – had worsened the problem.

She said in her experience, she rarely witnessed vaccine sceptics before the pandemic. “It’s now something that I’m having a conversation most weeks with my patients about.”

Hoffman added that GPs wanted patients to speak openly about their concerns about vaccines rather than going down “a TikTok rabbit hole” that could provide false information about the risks.

“We want our patients to come and talk to us about anything that they’re hearing through the media or that they’re worried about. And we’d much rather that they spoke to their GP than went on a TikTok rabbit hole, which may or may not be linking them up with correct information,” Hoffman said.

Hoffman added that people often didn’t realise the vaccine needed to be taken annually and that could have contributed to falling rates.

Flu vaccination rates have decreased for all age groups in Victoria and NSW, except for those aged between five and 15-years-old.

The flu vaccine is free for select vulnerable groups, but otherwise costs about $20 to $30.

NOTE: NOTHING IN THIS LIFE IS FREE. WE THE TAXPAYER PAYS FOR IT(IEB)

Wright said governments could encourage the uptake of the vaccine for children by making the intranasal vaccine, administered as a nasal spray, free.

“Many children are fearful of needles, which can stall vaccination efforts,” Wright said. “That’s why needle-free vaccinations are a game changer.”

Queensland, NSW, SA and WA have committed to providing free childhood intranasal vaccinations ahead of 2026, but other jurisdictions have not.

End

I repeat, this article is not journalism. It is public relations for the pharmaceutical industry, dressed up as health advice. It shames the public for exercising discernment, dismisses legitimate scientific concerns as conspiracy, and promotes an unsafe and ineffective product.

Australians deserve better. They deserve the truth. They must be respected and all the adverse risks of vaccination be explained. They should be given full, free, voluntary informed consent before taking the injection. They deserve genuine and superior prevention. And they deserve to know that influenza vaccination is not the solution—it is part of the problem.

Ian Brighthope