“Shocking Report” on flu vaccines is neither shocking nor correct

Flu season is coming, and once again it’s time to get your flu shot (or snort, if you prefer FluMist). It’s not perfect, but the vaccine is your best protection against the influenza virus.

So I was surprised to stumble upon an article titled “Johns Hopkins Scientist Reveals Shocking Report on Flu Vaccines,” which popped up on an anti-vaccine website two weeks ago. Johns Hopkins University is my own institution, and I hadn’t heard any shocking new findings. I soon discovered that this article contained only a tiny seed of truth, surrounded by a mountain of anti-vaccine misinformation. Most of it focused on a report published in early 2013 by Peter Doshi, a former postdoctoral fellow at Hopkins.

First, as Snopes.com has already pointed out, Doshi is not a virologist or an epidemiologist, but rather an anthropologist who studies comparative effectiveness research. He never conducted influenza research at Hopkins. (He’s now an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Pharmacy.) Second, Doshi’s 2013 article was an opinion piece (a “feature”), not an original research article, and it did not report any new findings. Third, it is highly misleading to suggest (as the anti-vax article’s title does) that Doshi somehow represents Johns Hopkins University. At Johns Hopkins Hospital, the flu vaccine is required of all personnel who have contact with patients, as a good-practices effort to minimize the risk that a patient will catch the flu from a caregiver.

But what did Doshi’s article say? Even though it isn’t new, why are the anti-vaccine sites recycling it? His central argument is this:

“The vaccine might be less beneficial and less safe than has been claimed, and the threat of influenza appears overstated.”

Let’s look at this statement. It’s almost obviously true: one only has to find a few overstated claims about the risks of flu, which isn't hard to do. But it’s also completely consistent to state that the vaccine is enormously beneficial and that the threat of influenza is very serious. See how that works? 

Doshi uses this slight-of-hand to suggest that the vaccine may not be beneficial at all. He never says this outright—instead, he just questions, again and again, whether the precise percentages reported in published studies are accurate. For example, he makes a big deal of a CDC announcement in 2013 that the vaccine’s effectiveness was only 62%. He casts doubt with phrases like 

“the 62% reduction statistic almost certainly does not hold true for all subpopulations”

which is almost certainly true, but is meaningless from the point of view of public health. Of course the vaccine doesn’t have the same effectiveness in everyone. The point is that it works most of the time. 

Doshi cites another study that showed a clear benefit for the flu vaccine, only to cast doubt on it with this argument: 

“No evidence exists, however, to show that this reduction in risk of symptomatic influenza for a specific population—here, among healthy adults—extrapolates into any reduced risk of serious complications from influenza such as hospitalizations or death in another population.”

Again, Doshi’s argument doesn’t prove that the original study was wrong, only that it doesn’t apply to everyone. But Doshi’s motivation, as evidenced by the relentlessly negative slant of his entire article, seems to be to convince people that the flu vaccine is bad.

Not surprisingly, the anti-vaccine movement has embraced Doshi (for example, here and here). And unfortunately, he seems to have accepted their acclaim: in 2009, he spoke at an anti-vaccine conference hosted by NVIC, a notorious (and misleadingly named) anti-vaccination group.

Perhaps even more disturbing is that Doshi signed a petition arguing that the HIV virus is not the cause of AIDS, joining the ranks of HIV denialists. He signed this statement while still a graduate student, so I contacted him to ask if he still doubted the link between HIV and AIDS. I also asked him if he supports flu vaccination, if he agrees with the anti-vaccine movement's use of his statements, and if he believes the flu is a serious public health threat.

On the question of signing the HIV/AIDS petition, Doshi responded that "Seeing how my name was published and people have misconstrued this as some kind of endorsement, I have written the list owner and asked for my name to be removed." (He declined to state directly - and I gave him the chance - that he agrees that the HIV virus causes AIDS.)

As for the flu itself, Doshi says "I don’t agree with CDC’s portrayal of influenza as a major public health threat." So he and I have a serious disagreement there. I asked if he agrees with the anti-vaccinationist who are using his writings to claim that the flu vaccine is ineffective, and he replied that while "ineffective" is "too sweeping," he has found "no compelling evidence of hospitalization and mortality reduction in [the] elderly."

Doshi’s argument against the flu vaccine boils down to this: the vaccine is much less than 100% effective. This is undeniably true, and the research community makes no secret of it. In fact, many of us have repeatedly called for more research into better vaccines, in the effort to create a vaccine that is not only more effective, but that (like most other vaccines) only needs to be taken once for lifetime immunity. We’re just not there yet. Meanwhile, though, the annual flu vaccine is usually effective: a recent study showed, for example, that it reduced children’s risk of ending up in a pediatric intensive care unit by 74%.

So get your flu shot (or snort) now, before flu season hits, because it takes a couple of weeks for your body to develop immunity. By getting immunized, you’ll not only increase your chances of getting through the winter flu-free, but (because you won’t spread the flu to others) you might also save someone whose immune system would be overwhelmed by influenza.