CBS Report Examines Flu Vaccine Effectiveness in Seniors

Here's Sharyl Attkisson with our report.

Millions of seniors swear by their annual flu shots.

After all, 90% of people killed by the flu are 65 or older.

That's perfect. But CBS News has learned that behind the scenes, public health officials have come to a new and disturbing conclusion: mass vaccinations of the elderly haven't done the job. Dr. Walter Orenstein was among the first to notice the problem when he headed up the Centers for Disease Control's National Immunization Program.

He says it's now become a consensus among public health experts.

And what is absolutely clear is that there is still a substantial burden of deaths and hospitalizations out there that has not been prevented through the present strategy.

Here's what scientists have found. Over 20 years, the percentage of seniors getting flu shots increased sharply from 15% to 65%. It stands to reason that flu deaths among the elderly should have taken a dramatic dip, making an X graph like this.

Instead, flu deaths among the elderly continued to climb. It was hard to believe, so researchers at the National Institutes of Health set out to do a study adjusting for all kinds of factors that could be masking the true benefits of the shots.

But no matter how they crunched the numbers, they got the same disappointing result: flu shots have not reduced deaths among the elderly.

It's not what health officials hoped to find.

NIH wouldn't let us interview the study's lead author, so we went to Boston and found the only co-author not employed by NIH, Dr. Tom Reichert.

We realized that we had incendiary material.

Dr. Reichert says they thought their study would prove vaccinations had helped.

We, uh, we were trying to do something mainstream, that's for sure.

Were you surprised? Uh, astonished. Did you check the data a couple of times to make sure?

Well, even more than that. We've looked at other countries now, and the same is true.

That study, soon to be published, finds the same poor results in Australia, France, Canada, and the UK.

And other new research stokes the idea that decades of promoting flu shots in seniors, and the billions spent, haven't had the desired result.

The current head of National Immunizations confirms CDC is now looking at new strategies, but stopped short of calling the present policy a failure.

There's an active dialogue into how we can do better to prevent influenza and its complications in the elderly.

So what's an older person to do? The CDC says they should still get their flu shots, that it could make flu less severe or prevent other problems not reflected in the total numbers.

But watch for CDC to likely shift in the near future more toward protecting the elderly in a roundabout way by vaccinating more children and others around them who could give them the flu.

Sharyl Attkisson, CBS News, Washington.