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Did You Get A Flu Shot?
So, I was talking to a mom friend of mine who was coming down with a cold. I asked her if she had her flu shot this season. She said, “No. I don’t get flu shots. I’m a little skeptical of them.” Skeptical? She explained that she never got them as a child and thought that they really weren’t that effective. After I picked my jaw up off the floor, I asked her if her kids get them. Nope.
Are there a lot of flue shot skeptics out there that I haven’t met yet? Having been raised by a mother who was a nurse, yearly flu shots were mandatory. My family got their flu shots this season. My sons’ school even offered free vaccines. Now, I know that there has been some controversy regarding this year’s flu shot strain.Even if this year’s shot is less effective than in years past, is it wise to skip it? Are there justifiable and informed reasons to not get the flu shot every year?
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Yeah, I have a close (though much older) relative who doesn’t get the vaccines because of an egg-white allergy. He also has a life-threatening peanut allergy, perhaps due to his being an underweight child who was fed tons of peanut-butter in early life to fatten him up. (The weirdest things can sensitize you, especially if you’re predisposed.)
I think anyone with a health condition should use all methods of caution when it comes to the Flu, or anything else, so we’re not in disagreement there.
I just don’t think that the human body, or seasonal contagions, have evolved so much in the last century to warrant a mandatory Flu shot.
On the other hand, they still use immunotherapy – tiny doses of stuff you’re sensitive to – to desensitize you even when you’re an adult.
I ate peanut butter every day as a kid, so did everyone else I knew. I don’t remember having a peanut table in the school lunch room though. My wife and I have gone through our mental inventories as to whether or not our child was showing any signs prior to vaccination and we can’t seem to find any. (Which is a common question among the medical profession.)
She ate celery and peanut butter and just about anything you would feed a kid with peanuts in it, just like her older sister did. Nothing seemed unusual until after she was vaccinated. Then it was immediate and a violent reaction.
There’s no history on either side of the family of an allergy and the only thing we can conclude, from our research, is that her body rejected the peanut oil along with the vaccination itself. Which usually is the case in peanut allergy cases, but the reaction stems from the vaccines themselves.
Please be cautious in making statements like this. It’s easy to find numerous webpages describing secret use of peanut oil in making vaccines, but there is little evidence that these allegations are true
To the best of my knowledge – having worked in the field – peanut oil has not been introduced into vaccines given to humans in the US. Certainly, all manufacturers have been required to list all ingredients in their vaccines (and their factories are visited quite regularly by the FDA to ensure compliance), and there is no record of its use.
This isn’t to say that all vaccines are always safe. By definition, vaccines manipulate your immune system – they trick it into thinking the body is infected with a dangerous agent when it isn’t. It’s not unreasonable to be wary of such manipulation, and it’s also not unreasonable to be cautious when a new vaccine is brought to the market. And we also still don’t have a satisfactory explanation for the rise in allergies.
But that doesn’t change the fact that much of the “evidence” used to discredit certain vaccines is either misleading, distorted, or completely untrue. And the “peanut oil in vaccines” claim is on very shaky ground.
It’s prima-facie plausible that getting something injected directly into your bloodstream along with other stuff intended to cause an immune response could be sensitizing. Certainly, *I* haven’t got the expertise to dismiss such a hypothesis.
I’ve recently switched to sublingual allergy drops myself. Sublingual immunotherapy has recently come down in price, and while I have no instinctive horror of needles, I figure why inject more stuff right into my body, unmediated by the natural barriers of mucous membranes, than I have to? (Injecting random stuff into their bodies doesn’t seem to do drug addicts any good – and that’s apart from the drugs themselves.) Plus, sublingual drops can be done at home, saving drives to the doctor’s office and making it easier to comply.
I’ve gotten flu shots every year, simply because I have poor health and influenza can be a big deal (not life-threatening or anything, just big enough to put me out of commission for months).
I’m another one who had all the normal shots as a kid, but has never had a flu shot. Maybe I should start? I agree the cost/risk is tiny, but then I will go years at a time without getting sick.
I do regularly get a tetanus booster every few years, because I’m constantly getting little cuts and punctures from all kinds of filthy things. Is this too cautious?
My sister is another probable victim of over-hygiene–she has juvenile diabetes. And no, no one I remember as a kid was peanut-allergic. There were a few athsmatics. There is something to this–people in third world countries just categorically do not have these autoimmune things, right?
My kids get the flu shot but I don’t. I figure if I get the shot, then I won’t get sick. And if I don’t get sick, then I won’t get a day off during the first five months of the year.
Being sick ain’t so bad.
I’d say no.
Tetanus is nasty. Why wouldn’t you want to build an immunity to it, especially since you routinely get punctured by dirty stuff?
We-ell… Diabetes and asthma were identified in ancient Egypt and Greece, when hygiene was still at third-world levels. So autoimmune diseases have probably always been around, it’s just that they become a much bigger deal in first-world countries.
Additional plausible explanations could include more kids with autoimmune diseases surviving childhood to reproduce, rather than just adding to the infant mortality statistics, thereby increasing the susceptibility of the next generation; people becoming affluent enough to care more about their health, so that rather than passively suffering their entire (perhaps shortened) lives with a mystery complaint, they see a doctor and get diagnosed instead… Shrug.
It’s kind of a bummer to know that my bloodline is a sort of reverse-eugenics experiment. (Isn’t three generations of asthmatics enough?) But whatcha gonna do?
I don’t get the flu shot every year, but when I don’t it’s from forgetfulness. I did get it this year, and I’ve (knock on wood) not gotten sick yet. Last year (’13-’14) I did not get the shot and I got a nasty bug on an airplane (well, I got sick shortly after flying).
Sure, if you’re typically in robust good health, and you bounce back from illness quickly, being sick could be seen as a holiday.
Ironically, one of the best correlations is between expected mothers who spike a high fever during pregnancy (most often caused by the flu) and autism. Mothers should start popping tylenol if they have any signs of fever… and get their flu shots.
Here’s what happens when you call out Ricochet anti-vaxers as I did a year and a half ago.
I’m typically bored. So it shakes things up a little.
Seconding this. I had a roommate a while back who was skeptical of the flu vaccine because he didn’t understand how it worked. When I explained that it was similar to being exposed to the actual disease and gave his body the immunity exactly as he would like it to happen, it seemed to change his mind.
I’ve never gotten a flu shot. My wife and kids get ’em, but I don’t bother. I rarely get sick anyway. I know people who get the annual shot and then get sick anyway, but they’re convinced that they’re “less sick” with the shot than without. That seems a completely unprovable conclusion.
As others have stated, I’m not an anti-vaxxer, but the flu shot seems a waste of time and resources given its relative ineffectiveness.
The medical and scientific literature is quite clear that suppressing fever reliably leads to much worse outcomes.
Well, don’t court ill-health too assiduously, then, because ill-health can get boring very quickly ;-)
Never have gotten the flu shot, but I am in no way skeptical of vaccines. I don’t get them because I have very little contact with large numbers of people. If I worked in a school, hospital, or had a cashier job I would definitely get the flu shot.
Me too, Charlotte. And I can’t explain it better than you did.
No I didn’t.
I’m not a skeptic. I’m pathologically lazy.
I don’t recall ever getting the flu. And I certainly haven’t gotten a flu shot at least since I was a kid. It’s not a principled decision. It was just never a concern.
Generally, I’m skeptical of any medical consensus involving chemicals and germs. I’m not against vaccines or medicines. I just think there’s a lot of junk science and a lot of politics in the industry (extensively educated professionals typically lean Left, after all). I do not as a rule trust doctors, though I don’t distrust them either.
After anonymous’s post on the flu last year, flu vaccines make less sense to me (at least in memory). John explained how a vaccine targets a particular strain of flu, out of many possibilities, — a wild guess — while the body maintains antibodies only for the first strain that it ever encountered. So it’s unclear to me how a vaccine works, if it only causes the body to produce more antibodies for the original strain rather than for the strain in the vaccine. If the body thinks flu is flu and strain doesn’t matter, then it doesn’t respond particularly to the vaccine strain.
Oh, I get the flu every couple of years or so.
I don’t see a few days off work watching Netflix, playing Civilization V, and eating copious amounts soup as a bad thing.
It’s our corporate overlords who are so intent on ensuring that we don’t get any days off that they’re want us to stick NEEDLES in our ARMS!!!
They’re in league with the Reverse Vampires, I tells ya’.
Nope.
I get yearly flu shots and got one again this year. I have since been told that the strain of flu that I was vaccinated for is not the strain of flu that is going around this year. OK. Since I don’t have the flu, I assume it won’t make a difference anyway. I am vaccinated for…
I sincerely doubt this is true in the small window of pregnancy.
I’m a big fan of vaccines, but don’t typically get the flu shot. There’s a fundamental difference between flu vaccines and most other vaccines.
Vaccines for diseases like measles or polio convey long-term immunity. These are clear wins from a risk-reward perspective.
Measles and polio are genetically stable organisms. Their mutation rate is slow, so the vaccines are effective, as the virus you encounter later in life is most likely the same one your were vaccinated against.
Influenza, on the other hand, is very unstable. Vaccinations offer short-term protection against certain strains, but then the virus changes, rendering the vaccine moot. The strain you were vaccinated against isn’t coming back, but a new one is.
Further, the vaccine offered has a pretty long lead time in production. As happened this year, the strain that became predominant wasn’t included in the vaccine. It may even be the case that the strain that became predominant did so because it wasn’t included in the vaccine.
So unlike other diseases, getting a flu vaccine doesn’t mean you’re not going to get the flu.
So then move on to efficacy: has the flu vaccine reduced incidence? We have no idea:
“CDC does not know exactly how many people die from seasonal flu each year.”
But likely not:
“CDC estimates that from the 1976-1977 season to the 2006-2007 flu season, flu-associated deaths ranged from a low of about 3,000 to a high of about 49,000 people.”
Because:
“During years when the flu vaccine is not well matched to circulating viruses, it’s possible that no benefit from flu vaccination may be observed. During years when there is a good match between the flu vaccine and circulating viruses, it’s possible to measure substantial benefits from vaccination in terms of preventing flu illness. However, even during years when the vaccine match is very good, the benefits of vaccination will vary across the population, depending on characteristics of the person being vaccinated and even, potentially, which vaccine was used.”
Getting a flu vaccine is sort of like carrying an umbrella because of the weather forecast. Sometimes you’re still going to get rained on, and a lot of times you’ll be carrying your umbrella in the sun.
Interestingly, according to one study, most people hospitalized who are diagnosed as having the flu don’t actually have it. So we really have no clue about efficacy, except to say that it’s not great, “moderate protection” is how that study puts it.
So if I had a compromised immune system or was over-65 and malnourished (most older Americans) I would be inclined to get a flu vaccine. But I’m not, and can’t be bothered unless someone walks into my office with a needle. This was the official recommendation from the 1960s to 2010.
In my personal experience, fixing my diet and therefore my nutrition has been far more effective at reducing my susceptibility to the flu than getting shots.
Are you basing this opinion on any evidence, or just on what you hope to be true?
Vaguely related: a few years ago I read a book of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short stories. It was an old copy. The illness in question was rendered in print as ‘flu. I found this to be utterly charming. And that thing you hold up to your ear and talk into? That was a ‘phone.