However, I am concerned about the needle-haystack phenomenon with ebola.
Can you link me to a reasonable, digestible abstract about the real pros-and-cons of flu shot?
The CDC has changed stances to recommend everyone (over 6 months) get a flu shot every season.
The CDC has a good rundown: http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/qa/flushot.htm
Regardless, a person with nothing to fear from the flu getting the shot anyhow and having a fever for a few hours sounds like a cakewalk compared to what happens if they don't and infect me, even through my vaccination: I am very asthmatic and the flu for me can easily turn into months of bronchitis, or -- even worse -- pneumonia and hospital trips.
People like me rely on herd immunity to supplement our own vaccinations. Please get vaccinated.
The two key points:
1. "The most frequent reactions reported after vaccination in children and adults are pain and other injection-site reactions. Up to 64% of people vaccinated with IIV experience pain at the injection site, which usually resolves in <2 days without treatment."
2. "Fever, malaise, myalgia, and other systemic symptoms that can occur after vaccination with IIV most often affect persons who have had no previous exposure to the influenza virus antigens in the vaccine (e.g., young children). In adults the rate of having these events is similar after IIV and after a placebo injection."
So other than your arm aching for <2 days where injected, the 'symptoms' are no more common than a placebo injection.
edit: Jeez, downvotes? Did I say something wrong? I'm not trying to troll, just answering the question.
You may be infecting elderly and babies but are unaffected, as others have said a flu shot isn't so much about protecting you it's about people around you. My 70 year-old dad has IPF his lungs are shot and if he catches the flu he's as good as dead.
It's frustrating the ambivalence or apathy or just outright paranoia is so prevalent these days. At my workplace out of 400 people one year only 3 people got a flu shot; myself and two others. The majority are 20-somethings and others who don't get the concept of a vaccines.
I feel like saying "We don't care about just you we care about everyone!" but it's not a very good catch phrase.
As other comments have said, the main reason for healthy young people to take flu shots is to limit spread of the disease to people who will die from the flu or who cannot take flu shots. But you may very well get direct benefit for yourself, and the risk is very small.