Flu Research Once Banned Because It Was Deemed Too Dangerous Is Set to Resume
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But yes i like the idea but would prefer proper filter technic :)
Other vaccines are great, this is specifically about the annual "flu shot" that's being pushed so hard every fall in ads/media: I'm pretty convinced that it either weakens my immune system too much or is just released too late to be effective.
If I may ask, why mention it when it's localized to just yourself?
This is not really closer...
The parent's hypothesis isn't automatically wrong just because it is an anecdote. Neither is it automatically correct. But people need to be free to say, "Hey, I did this and what happened wasn't what I expected."
Correlation is not causation. You get a flu shot because you might catch the flu (ie. flu season).
> About 5 years ago I just stopped getting the shot and... haven't had the flu since, despite spending time with people with the flu.
If you got flu a couple of years running, your immune system built up a reservoir of antibodies. It has been shown that flu "history" is persistent across years--for example, your body fights off the flus you are exposed to as a child much more effectively than something novel.
I’m almost certain the flu vaccine would have prevented this as I had gotten the flu vaccine and she had not. Only she got sick. We’ll never know for sure what caused it, because that’s just not how this kind of thing works, but our daughter is looking at a life of having to give herself catheters and enemas and likely kidney failure in her 60s because of her condition.
If we could go back in time she’d have gotten that vaccine in a heartbeat. It just hadn’t occurred to her as a thing to do.
Edit: accidentally repeated myself
PS. The fact that you get infected just a few weeks after the shot means you're getting it too late.
Also, one single person's experiences with the flu vaccine are not much to go on when making conclusions about the effectiveness of the flu vaccine for millions or billions of people.
Just to provide a counterexample, my own experience has been that I used to never get the flu vaccine, and once got so sick with the flu that I thought I was going to die (later I learned that some people actually do die from the flu). Then I started getting the vaccine every year, and since then I mostly didn't get the flu, but in the years I did my symptoms have been relatively mild and short-lived -- it usually lasts a day, and I don't feel like I'm going to die; instead, I just get some weakness and muscle aches.
Another thing to consider is that there may be other reasons for getting sick or not, apart from your vaccination status. I used to have a poor diet and some nutrient deficiencies, but since I improved my diet and started taking supplements like vitamin D and B12, I very rarely get sick. I think my immune system is probably just generally stronger than it used to be.
So to really make solid conclusions about the effectiveness of flu vaccines, you not only have to study large groups of people, but you also have to control for all the other factors that could potentially influence how frequently and how severely people get sick from the flu.
You say you’re not taking an anti-vax stance, but when you discount scientific evidence in favor of your own anecdotes and make up theories about vaccines not containing what they say, that’s exactly what you’re doing.
I got the flu as a teenager one year when I didn't get the vaccine. It was really bad, like 10X worse than a cold. I'd have rather died than kept living like that -- knowing that it would end was actually helpful to my ability to psychologically endure it.
I've gotten the flu vaccine every year thereafter and never got the flu again over the next two decades.
I would pay $2K to avoid the flu / colds each year.
In the end, I feel like it's more an economic reason we pursue this: a lot of people get the flu often, so it's a large market.
> The 1918 influenza pandemic (January 1918 – December 1920; colloquially known as Spanish flu) was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic, the first of the two pandemics involving H1N1 influenza virus.
H1N1 is one of the three types of flu (flu A-H1N1, flu A-H3N2, and flu B) the annual flu shot protects against: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_vaccine
That beats firearm and motor vehicle deaths combined.
That it might save you a couple of days of misery is a nice bonus, but not the primary reason to get the shot.
Because of the anti-vax movement, it's impossible to debate this rationnaly. The antivaxers will not listen to any argument. But the others also accept anything "vaccine" without thinking like steve irwin or mr roger: it's good, and you can't say anything bad about it.
But again, in medecine, there is no such things as a free lunch. Any drug has known and unkwown side effects, and interractions with the env, and should be use if it's worth it. It's then important to debate what is.
This is simply false.
We've got millions of people in an experimental group - those who regularly get their flu shots. We've got millions in a control - those who don't.
If the flu shot were impacting health negatively, we'd know by now. The first flu shots were given as far back as WWII.
The general populatuon is not a control group.
Someone else in the comments mentions that last years vaccine was particularly ineffective, at only about 50%. Google says the vaccine costs ~$40, so since it's only 50% effective, let's double that cost to $80 to account for the odd year where it isn't effective¹. (And that's a bad year, so typically, we can expect better.) So, what's cheaper: spending a week in bed miserable, trying to get over the flu and the lost productivity entailed by that disease, or $80? My time is definitely worth way more than $80 — even at minimum wage it's likely a payoff, if not just that I think most of us would willingly just pay that $80 to avoid the misery. (I mean, I do: I get the shot. It's also covered for me by my healthcare, so it's sort-of $0 to me, personally. I don't get $80 back if I don't get it.)
¹I'm not sure if this is quite the statistically right way to do this, but I think it's close enough that the point holds. My point is that, even conservatively, getting the vaccine pays off.
Perhaps it's because they remember how the H1N1 flu pandemic of 1918 killed 50 to 100 million people...
Or rather, there's not something called "common flu" (there's something called "common cold" colloquially, but even that is a umbrella term for tons of viruses).
Now, regarding influenza (flu), the virus, as Wikipedia puts it "Influenza (H1N1) virus is the subtype of influenza A virus that was the most common cause of human influenza (flu) in 2009, and is associated with the 1918 outbreak known as the Spanish Flu."
So, yes, the H1N1 (1918) and the influenza A (most common modern variety of flu) are closely related types of the virus.