Shannon Brownlee says a number of doctors/researchers doubt TheFlu orthodoxy - the effectiveness of the Flu Vaccine and antivirals. What if flu vaccines do not protect people from dying--particularly the elderly, who account for 90 percent of deaths from seasonal flu? And what if the expensive antiviral drugs that the government has stockpiled over the past few years also have little, if any, power to reduce the number of people who die or are hospitalized?

Why, then, has the federal government stockpiled millions of doses of antivirals, at a cost of several billion dollars? And why are physicians being encouraged to hand out prescriptions to large numbers of people, without sound evidence that the drugs will help? The short answer may be that Public Health officials feel they must offer something, and these drugs are the only possible remedies at hand... The annals of medicine are littered with treatments and tests that became medical doctrine on the slimmest of evidence, and were then declared sacrosanct and beyond scientific investigation... "Vaccines give us a false sense of security," says [Sumit Majumdar]. "When you have a strategy that (everybody thinks) reduces death by 50 percent, it's pretty hard to invest resources to come up with better remedies."... In the U.S., by contrast, our reliance on vaccination may have the opposite effect: breeding feelings of invulnerability, and leading some people to ignore simple measures like better-than-normal hygiene, staying away from those who are sick, and staying home when they feel ill. Likewise, our encouragement of early treatment with antiviral drugs will likely lead many people to show up at the hospital at first sniffle. "There's no worse place to go than the hospital during flu season," says Majumdar. Those who don't have the flu are more likely to catch it there, and those who do will spread it around, he says. "But we don't tell people this."

Much more here http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/z2009-10-26-BrownleeFluContra