Dr. Brogan to Women: Reclaim Your Pregnancy – Dismiss Obstetrical Bullying and Reject the Flu Shot

Women have permitted doctors and pharmaceutical companies privileged access to their fierce and primitive drive toward protecting a pregnancy. They have been made to feel fear, convinced that they need the support of the apparatus of allopathic medicine to get them through this perilous trial. I’d like to take a moment to pause. Take a deep breath. And ask the women reading this to look inside and to check if that compass is there. I have discussed, in previous articles, the concerns surrounding the recommendation of a pharmaceutical product to healthy pregnant women despite the lack of any general population studies. Determining that something is “safe” in pregnancy is like saying that because individuals don’t have car accidents on passage from point A to B, that riding in a vehicle is safer than walking. For ethical reasons, pharmaceutical products cannot be studied in a randomized manner in pregnancy, severely limiting our ability to look at short or long-term outcomes. The surprising news is that vaccines, the pharmaceutical product in question, have never been studied in a truly placebo controlled manner, in single, or multiple deliveries, and not for long-term outcomes, even in a general population.

Should Pregnant Women and Children be Getting the Flu Vaccine?

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warns pregnant women and young children not to eat fish containing high levels of methylmercury. Yet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends pregnant women and infants get influenza vaccines, many of which contain ethylmercury from the preservative thimerosal. Receiving them may result in mercury exposures exceeding the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recommended maximum levels. World Mercury Project is deeply concerned that the risks of getting mercury-containing seasonal influenza vaccines may outweigh the benefits for pregnant women, infants and children. Mercury is known to be highly toxic to brain tissue and can impact critical stages of brain development. A 2017 CDC study links miscarriage to flu vaccines, particularly in the first trimester. Pregnant women vaccinated in the 2010/2011 and 2011/2012 flu seasons had two times greater odds of having a miscarriage within 28 days of receiving the vaccine. In women who had received the H1N1 vaccine in the previous flu season, the odds of having a miscarriage within 28 days were 7.7 times greater than in women who did not receive a flu shot during their pregnancy. A study published in 2016 that looked at the safety of flu vaccines found a moderately elevated risk for major birth defects in infants born to women who had received a flu vaccine during the first trimester of pregnancy. A study published in 2017 found an elevated risk of autism spectrum disorders in children whose mothers had a first trimester flu shot.