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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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Before kids I did not bother but since, we get them every year. I think it is tough to, as a sample of one, measure effectiveness. How often does one get the flu (I mean full influenza, not a bad cold) every few years? So, if you reduce that say 50% it is tough to measure.
What I love is the other side claims to be the scientific ones, yet they are the first not to vaccinate. I’m not saying there are not risks with vaccinations, but the consequences of not vaccinating (as is evidenced by the return of whooping cough, etc) are undeniable. Plus, not to play their fairness game, but it makes me mad that my family risks the vaccinations (e.g. possible allergic reaction) and they in their new age lifestyle wave the vaccination but still are protected because the other 90% of us took the risk.
Karen – the more I think about your story the more mad I get. I may need to punish Ricochet with a post of my own on vaccinations :)
Not necessarily a skeptic, from what I understand, it’s a good idea for the elderly. I’m 52, have tried it a couple times and didn’t find any noticeable difference.
PPF – Please do a vaccine post. I can’t believe that foolishness has created a measles outbreak in Disneyland. I remember a few years back when this very liberal mom in our moms club was talking up a book that questioned the necessities of vaccines. I wanted to scream at her. But I didn’t. That said, foregoing a flu shot is a little different than getting not getting standard childhood vaccines like MMR and such. For me, I look at the number of deaths per year from the flu compared to the risk factors with getting a flu shot and there’s no question in getting one – even if the effectiveness is minimal, some protection is better than none.
So here is the thing. We use the term “flu” for a whole grab bag of illnesses from rhinovirus to true influenza. I don’t have statistics here, but I would guess the majority of people who say they have the flu don’t actually have it. So you get the flu shot and you get sick it probably isn’t the flu. You don’t get the shot and you don’t get sick. According to WebMD you only have a 5%-20% chance of getting it anyway. So 19 years out of 20 you don’t ge the flue shot you don’t get sick, but that 20th year?
Also, there is a real importance to herd immunity. The more the people that get the shot the fewer people that will be carrying around spreadable copies of the virus. The fewer people with spreadable copies of the virus the less likely they are to infect that nice night nurse and grandma’s nursing home……….
I’m a believer married to a skeptic. Sometimes I get the flu despite the shot; he hasn’t yet gotten the flu despite no shot. But then, he enjoys unusually robust health and I don’t.
I am 100% full-bore pro-vaccine.
Except for the flu one. I can’t really explain why. I’ve never gotten a flu shot, and haven’t had the flu in years.
So that doesn’t shed much light, does it?
I must sheepishly admit that I did not always get the flu vaccine even when I was working in a virology lab doing research on….the flu vaccine. (Of course, I had some degree of passive immunity to at least one or two of the strains just by working in the lab, but still)
There is no sound scientific argument against getting vaccinated, especially if you are around small kids or the elderly. If there were any true threat posed by the vaccine, surely we would know about it after decades and decades of giving the vaccine to millions of people per year.
At the same time, I understand some of the skepticism. Of course most of us rarely if ever get an influenza infection, and the vaccine also doesn’t confer 100% protection. Most people will not recognize a difference. In many ways, herd immunity is like voting – no individual vote/vaccination will tip the scales, but each individual vote/vaccination is still necessary to achieve a greater goal.
Hopefully, this will all be moot in a few years anyway. They are moving toward a universal flu vaccine.
This is indeed a perplexing issue.
Interestingly, when agencies like the CDC report statistics about the flu season, they are usually not counting actual confirmed cases of influenza virus (which is expensive to test for), but merely patients with “influenza-like illness (ILI)” – which can obviously be caused by a number of agents, including those mentioned above.
There are a number of studies which try to estimate what percentage of ILI cases are actually genuine influenza, but they tend to be all over the map.
All four of us get the flu shot every ding durned year. I cannot remember the last time any of us had the flu. /hope I’m not jinxing us.
However, both my girls (12 and 16) were suspected of having whooping cough this last fall. Walking through the halls of their school sounded like you were in a TB ward. It was awful.
I’ve learned, though, that the pertussis vaccine is pretty lousy. Both my girls were up-to-date, but it turns out it’s just not very protective as vaccines go. (Their pediatrician gets it every year, as his body fails to make the antibody.)
In that way, it might be similar to flu vaccine — if you still get the disease, the vaccine only helps attenuate the symptoms.
My girls have started taking the nasal flu mist vaccine. It’s somewhat controversial as it’s an attenuated live-virus vaccine, but they haven’t had any serious problems with it, and it’s supposed to be much more protective (possibly over the course of several years). So far, so good.
Unfortunately, this is still something of a pipe dream.
I collaborated with a few of the people in the link above during grad school, and I can attest that this project has been going on for quite some time with only slow progress. The paper cited does not involve an actual vaccine, but rather a specific set of antibodies harvested from infected patients which is used to mimic those created in response to a theoretical vaccine. The problem is that reverse-engineering that theoretical vaccine turns out to be fiendishly difficult.
A more promising approach, in my opinion, are the attempts to drastically speed up the manufacturing process of the vaccine (primarily by moving away from eggs into cell culture) combined with continually-updated genetic libraries of all known flu strains. This would allow vaccine companies to ramp up full-scale production of a vaccine for a “new” influenza strain within a matter of weeks, instead of the six months to a year which were previously required.
I got the flu shot in late September and I am recovering from having the flu last week. Some years we have missed getting the flu shot because we were on vacation during the time it was offered free at my husband’s work but normally we get it. We did not get sick those missed years. The last time I had the flu was 1991.
So, to me, it feels like a crap shoot. However, getting this sick this year is a potent reminder of how the flu is something to be avoided if at all possible.
Well thanks for harshing my mellow man! Actually, even though that is disapointing it is good to know.
Flu shot? What? Why? How much?
I get one every year. I know it’s not a guarantee because sometimes a flu strain goes through the country that is different than the ones the vaccine is “programmed” for. Nevertheless, it’s cheap insurance.
‘Stangman was just itching for the day when his answer to “Did you get a flu shot?” could be, “I got ’em all shot!”
I have no dog in this fight, but reporter Sharyl Attkisson has summarized that several major studies have shown flu vaccination provides no benefit for the elderly.
http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/flu-shots-and-the-elderly/
http://sharylattkisson.com/govt-researchers-flu-shots-not-effective-in-elderly-after-all/
She didn’t opine on effectiveness for the non-elderly.
For what it’s worth, she appears to be a vaccine skeptic and ebola believer (I am still not sure what to call people who are not skeptical about ebola running rampant). Although I have not read those articles, I am predisposed to assume she is thorough in her investigative reporting after hearing of her sanctioning by CBS while trying to scrutinize the Obama Administration (she was working on Fast and Furious, and Benghazi).
Linda had a very major case of polio before there was a vaccine, has been paralyzed from the waist down her entire life, and is now a quadriplegic, losing the use of her arms from over use on crutches for over 60 years. She can not be medicated for almost any illness because of her lack of musculature, and an inability to process medications without amplifying the side effects. Now 66 years old, having extreme blood pressure issues, Linda has a pain tolerance that is far beyond the endurance of any other person I have ever met. She NEVER takes medications, even for an occasional minor cold or headache, and had broken her legs and knees many time over the years, without any major medical intervention other than setting the bones. And, yes, without pain killers.
Ray has traveled extensively in the third world, has been exposed to almost anything you can imagine. He generally drinks small quantities of the local water in any country, eats the local food, and uses no anti-bacterial anything, and never has. He rarely ever gets sick. Ray is 72.
The human immune system is a miraculous creation of God. If not taxed by unsanitary conditions, read pre-sewage treatment filth, it can protect against most general diseases, and promote natural recovery. Even Ebola, it appears, is not a serious disease here in the modern world. Good general health is, we believe, the reason.
Americans are caught up in a medical industry where drug and procedure marketing has folks acting the way New York did over a “blizzard” that did not happen yesterday. Name an issue, amplify it, convince everyone that money thrown in your direction will relieve their panic, and let the bucks roll in.
I haven’t been following that story.
Do we actually know the origin?
Disneyland has lots of foreign visitors, does it not?
What do we know beyond speculation?
My mom was a nurse, too, Karen, but while I think she gets the shot every year, I can’t remember ever getting one as a child. I haven’t ever bothered to get one as an adult either, and have only had one bought of actual flu. (Colds, stuffy noses, sore throats, and just general “I don’t want to get out of bed but I can’t sleep either” symptoms yes, but only once having the high fever and joint achiness of actual flu.)
I’m certainly no anti-vaxxer, but I’ve generally figured that as I don’t visit hospitals, day cares, nursing homes, or schools I’m at low risk of catching it from the endemic populations and giving it to the most vulnerable. As I understand it, the shot only guards against certain strains of influenza, and most of the “flu” people claim to have are various rhinoviruses that the shot is useless against. And given that until recently I didn’t have health insurance nor expendable cash for shots, it’s never really seemed to be a priority.
No, yes, and not much. But I think it’s a fair speculation that if all the Americans were getting vaccinated, then there would be sufficient herd immunity to keep the virus from spreading to those who haven’t/ can’t/ won’t get immunized.
I never once got a Flu shot growing up and neither did my parents. We got the Flu, of course, but we’re all still here. Has the Flu changed over the last 40 years that I’m unaware of?
We don’t do Flu shots in my family now. All of us have had the Flu and all of us are still here.
I do find the modern culture of sanitizing people interesting though. Everyone uses hand sanitizer obsessively and society is ultra-sensitive to spreading “Bacteria, or Infectious Germs”. Has the World really changed that much for the worse?
I can see a panic over the Measles outbreak, but that has to do with re-introducing it into our society from illegal aliens. Malaria has been defeated and the Plague as well. The Flu has always been a seasonal part of life and I haven’t heard of a mass epidemic of people dying from it, other than the same vulnerable people who were always at risk of severe effects from previous medical conditions.
I don’t have the energy for a full Google search, but as I recall, the best way to keep the elderly from dying of flu is by vaccinating all the school age children. Japan had a program that did so, and when it was discontinued, elderly death rates to flu increased something like 25%. If you can interrupt the transmission mechanism — and let’s face it, public schools are both petrie dishes and distribution systems for germs — then it is less important that the vaccine isn’t as effective in the elderly.
Of course, as people become capable of living longer and more productive lives even when they’re in the “vulnerable” category, they naturally become more interested in fending off what could kill or maim them once they’re in that “vulnerable” category.
What is the difference between the flu and a cold? I get a flu shot and get sick I am told I must of had a cold not flu. I don’t get the shot I am told the other way around. To me I am sick does it matter which one since they are about the same in the way I feel?
It’s all about the balance between risk, cost and benefit.
In a previous comment, Ray was absolutely correct that modern hygiene has saved more lives than all of our pills and shots combined. But since we have long since solved that problem in the first world, it is worth asking whether other inventions provide more benefits than their costs.
Certainly the smallpox and polio vaccines were immense lifesavers. Most of the other vaccines we regularly give kids have also been shown to have far greater benefits than costs.
The flu vaccine? Much less efficacious than the interventions above. But it is also relatively inexpensive to manufacture and is very well tolerated. So while it is valid to point to a healthy life without the flu shot and ask “why should I?”, after witnessing a colleague nearly lose her pregnancy from a flu infection contracted from an unvaccinated friend, I think it’s equally valid to ask “why not?”
Differential diagnosis is a game of playing the odds, and when the stakes are low enough, both doctors and patients can afford to be rather casual about accurate attribution.
I don’t dispute that at all. My contention is, is it really necessary to over sterilize, or could it cause a future epidemic and a weakness to normal conditions that the human body could repel on it’s own.
The Flu shot was non existent when I was growing up and I don’t remember one single person dying from it. I’m sure people did, but nobody I knew, so should all of society get a Flu shot? It just doesn’t cut the smell test for me.
This is interesting, and may cause an uproar from some contributors, but my 6 year old wasn’t allergic to peanuts until she was vaccinated. (Just for the record, I “AM” pro vaccination, but there is a lot of misinformation floating around on some things, such as Flu shots and Peanut allergies.) I did my homework afterwards, because I and my wife were completely perplexed with the fact that we had fed peanut products to our child, with no reaction, plenty of times before her two year vaccinations. After we had her vaccinated, she reacted and we almost lost her.
I asked her pediatrician about it and she was cordial, but claimed that it just wasn’t the case that the vaccinations had anything to do with her allergy. (Do you remember anyone allergic to peanuts when you were growing up?) Upon further research I found that the standard vaccines are, or were, impregnated in Peanut oil.
Now they use eggs, as I understand. Just food for thought.
I agree it’s probably not necessary to over-sterilize – and may even be harmful. Indeed, if the hygiene hypothesis is correct, I myself (a lifelong asthmatic) may even be one of the victims of an overly-hygienic upbringing (though in my case there also appears to be a strong hereditary component, irrespective of upbringing).
That said, a vaccine is different from over-sterilization. Getting vaccinated means getting a little bit dirty now in order to build up tolerance to even more dirt later, sort of the opposite of over-sterilization, to my mind.
From memory of an Econtalk podcast (Velasquez-Manoff on Autoimmune Disease, Parasites, and Complexity), the hygience hypothesis applies while young. While a child, being exposed to lots of germs boosts your immune system for life.
However, having not been exposed as a child, being exposed later in life does not provide the boosting effect. It just gets you sick.