Source: News Max Health: Federal health authorities vastly overstate the benefits of the flu shot and, for most healthy people, vaccination is unnecessary at best and potentially risky at worst, a Johns Hopkins scientist tells Newmax’s Steve Malzberg.

Peter Doshi, an influenza expert with the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, contends vaccines pushed by health authorities are less effective and cause more side effects than acknowledged by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Doshi, who recently published a withering report on influenza vaccines in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), says the studies that inform CDC’s flu policy show the vaccine doesn’t cover all strains of flu, and that life-threatening complications from influenza are fairly rare, but side effects can be serious.

“I’m not convinced that influenza is a major public health threat so I have problems with the overarching policy [pushing flu shots], but on a personal level I fit in the healthy adults [category] and so influenza’s particularly not a threat for me and for most healthy adults,” says Doshi, noting he doesn’t get the flu shot himself.

“This is a disease which is unpleasant if you do get it and most people don’t get it — it’s far more rare than we think — and this is again one of the big problems … we’re lead to think that everybody’s getting it and everyone is at risk for serious complications. The risk is quite a bit lower than we’re led to believe.”