Truth behind the 'flu season

History shows vaccines causing winter sickness

- by JACQUI DEEVOY

EVERY autumn, as the leaves turn and the air chills, we’re bombarded with dire warnings: ‘flu season is here!’

Pharmacists stockpile jabs, schools roll out the nasal sprays, and the BBC and mainstream newspapers whip up fear of a winter plague.

But what if this so-called season isn’t nature’s doing? What if it’s a man-made mirage, engineered by the very vaccines said to ‘protect’ those who believe in them? Perhaps it’s time to dismantle the flu season myth with a few cold, hard facts.

The concept of a distinct flu season – that predictable autumn/winter peak of sniffles, fevers and misery – didn’t exist until the early 20th century. And it emerged specifically after the widespread rollout of influenza vaccines in the 1940s.

Pre-jabs, influenza-like illnesses (ILIs) have been noted for millennia – Hippocrates described ‘catarrhal fevers’ way back in 412 BCE. But these were sporadic, year-round events, scattered like autumn leaves, with no seasonal pattern.

Take the infamous 1918 Spanish Flu: billed as a global pandemic, it raged non-seasonally from spring to autumn across the world (Journal of Infectious Diseases, 2006; UK National Archives). Old terms like ‘grippe’ or ‘la influenza’ meant random outbreaks, not a clockwork season.

Fast-forward to the vaccine era. The first inactivated flu jab was trialled on the U.S. Army in 1935, but mass rollout hit UK military between 1943–1945 during Word War Two (Vaccine, 2013).

By 1948, the NHS launched civilian programmes, with annual campaigns locked in by the 1950s. Simultaneously, ‘flu season’ popped into British medical literature. Here’s the smoking gun timeline:

■ 1943: First UK flu vaccine trials – zero mention of flu season in the Lancet (pre-1945).

■ 1948: NHS jab rollout – The Times runs the first winter flu season scare stories.