Video: Piers Morgan Falls Ill Days After Receiving Flu Vaccine

"Thimerosal ® is a ☠ mercury-containing [49% ☠ mercury by weight] preservative [toxic poison to kill life]"

Damn right to kill life. If you've got a multi-dose bottle and some harmful fungus or bacterium gets in you REALLY don't want it to multiply up a few thousand or million fold and then be injected into your body. A trace of a mercury compound may be not nice. But it is a heck of a lot less nasty than, say, a trace of live golden staph.

(I'm much more concerned about the aluminum than I am about the bit of mercury. Mercury works its way out of your body. Aluminum is mostly kept outside by the digestive system and skin. A little of what gets in can be entombed in your bones - but when "your bones are full" you're stuck with it circulating. It's associated with Alzheimer's-like symptoms. It was the cause of "dialysis disease", which limited the length of time early artificial kidney machines could be used before the patient started deteriorating - until they figured out they were being aluminum-poisoned and switched to stainless steel containers.)

"Formaldehyde is used to inactivate bacterial products for toxoid [toxic?] vaccines (these are vaccines that use an inactive bacterial toxin to produce immunity [Toxin produces immunity?].)

Wikipedia entry, with [my edits]: "A toxoid is a bacterial toxin (usually an exotoxin [something, usually horribly poisonous, that is ejected by the bug, while it lives or when it comes apart after dying]) whose toxicity has been inactivated or suppressed either by chemical (formalin) or heat treatment, while other properties, typically immunogenicity, are maintained." Toxoid vaccines create antibodies that attack, intercept, and clean up, the toxins themselves. Very useful against bugs that produce a toxin so nasty that even a near-fatal dose won't confer lasting immunity to survivors. Example: Tetanus.

Damn right toxins (or toxoids) produce immunity. That's the whole point: You provide the body with an irritant, to signal the immune system that there's something bad here, and a sample of a target molecule, or piece of one, from the surface of the disease organism, so it can figure out what to attack."

That algorithm also risks creating autoimmune reactions: The immune system is really good at sorting out, in advance, clones of immune cells that would attack your body if they were triggered to amplify, but it's not perfect. It also risks creating allergies to eggs, due to the egg proteins that are left over from growing the original virus in eggs to get the cell surface marker molecules to provide target samples.

The "killed virus that was grown in eggs" approach has the advantage that you can make a vaccine right away once you've got a sample of a new strain of the virus. But I'll be really glad when they switch to engineered bacteria producing snippets of "preserved regions" of viral surface proteins. That will be easy to grow on culture media that only contains stuff that's normally in the body and MUCH easier to purify, and by going after something that the virus can't change without breaking itself it will produce immunizations that go after whole families of virii and last for decades, getting us off the "guess this years' virii" treadmill.

"It is also used to kill unwanted viruses and bacteria that might contaminate the vaccine during production. Most formaldehyde is removed from the vaccine before it is packaged."

And there you go. Formaldehyde is not nice, either. But it's a relatively low level toxin to humans. It's also pretty easy to remove. The warning is about the trace that remains, like the "Don't hit yourself on the head with this hammer!" warning labels. What you get from a flu shot is about like being bitten by a couple ants (their formic acid is reacted to formaldehyde by your body), or the trace of methanol you'd get from a couple drinks (which gets reacted down the same pathway).

"Aluminum gels or salts of aluminum which are added as adjuvants to help the vaccine stimulate a better response."

Remember "irritant, to signal the immune system that there's something bad here"? If the toxin/toxoid/killed virus surface protein doesn't do enough damage to send the signal, you need something else to do that. I'd really rather they hadn't picked aluminum compounds. But this is not a free market, so we're stuck with the government-anointed suppliers and formulations. B-b

Immunizations are a game of balancing risks. I happen to be old enough, and this year's flu strain happens to be deadly enough to old folk, that I decided to get a shot this time around. Your risk factors, and your trust in the current medical paradigms and government agencies, may lead you to a different decision.

But that's freedom.

Meanwhile, different people making different decisions (and SOMEBODY making good ones, rather than EVERYBODY getting bit when the common decision is fatal) is why free societies are so robust.

going downhill lately. He used to be into so much alternative medicine. I think he was told to mainstream up or lose his show. It just wasn't fitting into their agenda.