Asking listeners to put aside his political orientation for a moment, talk-radio host Michael Savage questioned the federal government's recommendation that citizens get a flu shot.

"Did Harry Reid take a flu shot? Did Barack Obama take a flu shot? Did Barack Obama's lovely family take a flu shot? Did Joe Biden take a flu shot?" Savage asked.

"Which of the mandarins took the flu shot?"

He explained that he was talking specifically about vaccines and was not advocating the avoidance of all pharmaceuticals.

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Known for his many books on herbal medicines, Savage acknowledged he has benefited from "an awful lot of life-saving regular medicines."

"The flu vaccine?" he asked. "No, I wouldn't take it."

Savage noted "not everything your government tells you is true."

"So it's good to have a cynic in radio who questions authority," he said.

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Savage argued that Centers for Disease Control authorities have to guess what the vaccine should be made of.

"So they choose five strains out of 250-plus strains of Influenza A, and if they don't choose the right one, you're going to get sick," he said.

"So you're putting your faith in the CDC's ability to guess the one that might be a pandemic."

He said that this year, the CDC guessed right on two of the strains and wrong on one of them.

He acknowledged that many people calculate that the risk of a side effect is one in 1 million against the one-in-10,000 risk of being hospitalized or dying.

"But I believe the risks outweigh any benefit," Savage said.

The vaccine, he pointed out, contains formaldehyde and thimerosal – an organic compound containing mercury, which impairs the neurological and immune systems – along with detergents, antibiotics and allergens that cause infertility.

The CDC itself, he noted, lists some of these ingredients on its own website as harmful, though it insists the amounts in vaccines is negligible.

Someone may well say, Savage acknowledged," Well, I took the shot and it didn't kill me."

But when you're older, he argued, "and you get ALS or Alzheimer's disease or MS, or you watch your kid develop seizures, or your kid becomes autistic, God forbid, what are you going to say?"

The relationship between the vaccine and any one person acquiring these diseases can't be known for certain, he said, "But why increase the chances of inducing such illnesses in yourself and your children?"

He argued that when it comes to flu vaccines, his political leanings are not relevant.

Recalling a phrase he said he coined 30 years ago, the "language, borders, culture" talk host said, "Germs don't discriminate."

"They don't know if you're a good guy or bad guy," he said. "They don't care if you're a conservative or a liberal. They don't care if you're funny or mean. They don't care what your race is., what your sexual orientation is. They don't care what country you came from."