The CDC and FDA often claim that 36,000 people die every year from influenza. This is a flat out lie. If you actually go to the CDC’s MMWRs, Morbidity, Mortality Weekly Reports, they publish weekly, and the annual reports on how many people die from influenza… and in any given year the average is anywhere from 750 to 2,000 people that succumb to influenza. And most of these people have had pre-existing conditions. So they’ve had pre-existing health conditions that made them more susceptible to some other opportunistic disease that they’ve been exposed to. Recently, the CDC changed the 36,000 flu deaths per year figure and instead says that the death toll ranges from 3,300 to 49,000. One of the statistical issues is that the CDC places deaths from pneumonia along with deaths from the flu into the same category. On the CDC website, we see 55,227 deaths from influenza and pneumonia. When I open up the source document, which is the National Vital Statistics Reports, there’s a breakout of deaths, and we see that only 4,605 of the 55,227 deaths were actually attributable to the flu.