There is extensive evidence that stimulating a woman’s immune system cytokine production during pregnancy results in abnormal development of the baby’s brain, and increases the likelihood of neurological disorders — including depression, anxiety, and other behavioral disorders — later in life.

Stimulating the mother’s immune system during pregnancy also dramatically increases the risk of the child developing autism or schizophrenia early in life.

But it’s important to understand that it’s not the infectious organism (the virus) causing these problems. It’s the mother’s own immune system.

A recently published CDC-funded study reported in the medical journal “Vaccine” found that women who followed the CDC’s advice to have a flu vaccine with each pregnancy had a 400 percent increase in the rate of spontaneous miscarriage compared to unvaccinated women.

It has also been shown that the flu vaccine causes significant inflammation in a pregnant woman, leading to brain inflammation in the baby — which leads to immunoexcitotoxicity and abnormal development of the baby’s brain.

For all of these reasons, until quite recently it was accepted that a pregnant woman should never be vaccinated. Yet today, there is a campaign to vaccinate 100 percent of pregnant women.

The thinking behind this campaign is that reducing flu infections during pregnancy lowers the risk of a child developing autism or schizophrenia later in life. The problem with this idea is that flu infections in pregnant women are quite rare.

In fact, each flu season the number of people actually infected with the virus is quite small — 5 percent to 10 percent of adults. Most winter infections involve viruses not affected by the flu vaccine.

That means the number of women at risk from the flu during pregnancy is probably less than 1 percent.

And the vaccine itself has been shown to be no more than 30 percent to 40 percent effective in adults — at best.

But if you vaccinate 100 percent of pregnant women, you will dramatically stimulate immune cytokines in all of them.

Only time will tell if there will be a dramatic increase in schizophrenia and autism because of this insane policy.

It has also been shown that children’s first exposure to the flu virus through a natural infection improves their immune defense against subsequent flu infections, and aids the development of their immune systems.

On the other hand, it has been shown that giving the flu vaccine to a child each year significantly increases the child’s — or later, the adult’s — risk of contracting a flu infection and having a more severe infection.

The reason is that the flu vaccine suppresses protective immunity and interferes with immune memory.