Does the flu vaccine really reduce the risk of premature birth?

Here we have a media report on a 'study' that has been adjusted (a euphemism for the numbers being played with until the researchers got the results they set out to get) to show that there is a 70% lower risk of premature birth in babies born to mothers who got the flu vaccine during flu season than mothers who didn't.

First of all, in any random group of 400 women, how many would have babies born prematurely?

In the US, the March of Dimes has noted that there has been a 20% increase in the incidence of premature births since 1990. Let's see - what else has happened over these years? Oh, right! We have gone from 18 vaccines for children to over 60 vaccines for children...

"Preterm birth is the leading cause of death in the first month of life in the United States.  The preterm birth rate has increased about 20 percent since 1990, and costs the nation more than $26 billion a year, according to the Institute of Medicine report issued in July 2006." http://www.marchofdimes.com/aboutus/22684_42538.asp

So here we have a group of 400 families - one would assume that half of them got the flu vaccine and the other half didn't? Now, we have an even smaller cohort to look at. Out of a random group of 200 women, how many would be expected to have a premature birth or a low birth weight child? How many of these women smoked during their pregnancy? How many took pharmaceutical drugs? How many of them miscarried within a short time of receiving the vaccine vs miscarriages in the unvaccinated? Did they look at the outcome in the babies - were they more or less likely to have behavioural or developmental issues? Too many variables - too little information.

But based on this one 'study', we are told that using a flu vaccine that contains 24.5 mcg of neurotoxic, carcinogenic, immune system destroying mercury - a vaccine that has never been tested for its safety, efficacy or teratogenicity - can actually reduce the incidence of both preterm birth and low birth weight.

Let's not forget that the United States, which has more vaccines given to children than any other country in the world, is now number 47 out of the top 50 countries when it comes to infant mortality, trailing behind many developing nations. Australia is not doing that much better when it comes to that issue though we do not use as many vaccines as the US does - yet.

The only real way to study these vaccines is to compare the overall picture in a cohort of completely unvaccinated people with a cohort of the fully vaccinated. Scientists have refused to do this study and it is perplexing to understand why - unless they are afraid that the result they get may be the one that organisations like the AVN suspect - that unsafe and untested vaccines have been harming and killing people for centuries while the government and the medical community fiddled.

Articles like this one are just thinly-masked pharmaceutical advertising campaigns.

Sydney Morning Herald - Body and Soul - 17 July 2011