Mercola.com is a horrible chimera of tabloid journalism, late-night infomercials, and amateur pre-scientific medicine, and is the primary web presence of Joseph Mercola. Unfortunately, it is also one of the more popular alternative medicine sites on the web and as such is uncommonly efficient at spreading misinformation. I am not a fan, and have addressed his dross in the past.
Joseph Mercola has recently posted an excerpt from an individual he evidently holds in high regard, Bill Sardi. Bill published “18 reasons why you should not vaccinate your children against the flu this season.” Mercola chose his nine favorites (one would assume the nine best reasons), and re-posted it on Mercola.com. There are so many mistakes, so much misinformation in so little space, it’s almost a work of art. You know, like that crappy art that you might expect to find on the wall at an hourly motel. Without further delay, let’s examine Mercola and Sardi’s nine best reasons for you not to vaccinate your children against influenza this season:
1. The swine flu is simply another flu. It is not unusually deadly.
“Not unusually deadly.” Oh good, then we can expect only ~36,000 people to die from it this year! Why does that number not reassure me?
One could do an entire post on just this single misleading claim. Oh wait, we have. Suffice to say every influenza strain has unique characteristics, some subtle (like the differences between seasonal strains from 2005-2007), some glaringly different (like the pandemic strains of 1918, 1957, and 1968, or the H5N1 “bird flu”). Saying something is “simply another flu” is nearly meaningless.