Does the flu shot really work?

[gitana1]

Then you might want to keep away from new immigrants of all sorts, who have probably not gotten their flu shots. Just a thought.

That makes absolutely no sense. Then you need to not come into contact with anyone here on vacation or business from another country. Because it's not just "new immigrants" who come here.

Also, the vaccination rate for the flu shot appears to be higher in Europe than here. Other countries don't vaccinate as much due to shortages:

"Our current vaccination rate is around 38%, despite a flu season last year that took 80,000 lives. In the EU, the aggregate vaccination rate has been 41.8% with several countries vaccination rates approaching 70% or more. But the numbers of vaccinated people in other parts of the globe, specifically southeastern Asia, the eastern Mediterranean [1] and Africa are much less. What accounts for the disparities? Hint, it is not about money."

Influenza Vaccination is Global, But Not the Same

We have more to fear from a fellow citizen due to our dismally low vaccination rates than from a "new immigrant" who is probably happy to get a vaccine that's available.

 

[Lilibet]

That makes absolutely no sense. Then you need to not come into contact with anyone here on vacation or business from another country. Because it's not just "new immigrants" who come here.

Also, the vaccination rate for the flu shot appears to be higher in Europe than here. Other countries don't vaccinate as much due to shortages:

"Our current vaccination rate is around 38%, despite a flu season last year that took 80,000 lives. In the EU, the aggregate vaccination rate has been 41.8% with several countries vaccination rates approaching 70% or more. But the numbers of vaccinated people in other parts of the globe, specifically southeastern Asia, the eastern Mediterranean [1] and Africa are much less. What accounts for the disparities? Hint, it is not about money."

Influenza Vaccination is Global, But Not the Same

We have more to fear from a fellow citizen due to our dismally low vaccination rates than from a "new immigrant" who is probably happy to get a vaccine that's available.

You bit on what was really a stealth political post, Gitana.

But thanks for the stats and the very interesting article. I never realized that some areas of the world have a year round flu season because of their location between the northern and Southern Hemisphere. And many countries, including Australia, don’t provide access to a flu vaccine to some vulnerable people.

From the article you cited:

“Vaccination programs are more complex than the lay public appreciates, influenced by characteristics of our opponent, the influenza virus as well as our infrastructure and political will. We live in a country where many of these issues have been addressed, yet our vaccination rate is only 38%. Big Pharma has stepped up to increase production; now we need to concentrate on improving global demand.”

So blaming “new immigrants” is a politically-motivated falsehood (as usual).

 

[BetteDavisEyes]

Vaccine no match against flu bug that popped up near end

Atlanta – The flu vaccine turned out to be a big disappointment again.

The vaccine didn’t work against a flu bug that popped up halfway through the past flu season, dragging down overall effectiveness to 29%, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday.

The flu shot was working well early in the season with effectiveness put at 47% in February. But it was virtually worthless during a second wave driven by a tougher strain, at just 9%.

There was “no significant protection” against that strain, said the CDC’s Brendan Flannery...

 

[Trident]

Yep, get your flue shot - it works well at 47%, then falls off to 29%. What was it P. T. Barnum used to say?

My opinion only

 

[AC4RD]

I really should just keep my mouth shut, but this is something that is really important to us all.

Scientific studies have consistently shown a significant reduction in hospitalizations, ICU stays, and overall mortality, for vaccinated patients vs unvaccinated ones. This is why your insurance company will PAY for your flu shot: because it is statistically likely to help you avoid flu and flu complications, which can cost them much more money than the flu shots do. It is PROVEN that flu shots save lives. This is why my employer requires flu shots every year, and supplies them free--because they are proven to help employees avoid flu infections (and passing them on to patients.)

Now, this isn't the anecdotal evidence so many people believe. "My aunt got a flu shot and she had bad dreams for a week!" Flu shots may cause bad dreams, they probably don't. But we will NEVER know for sure until someone designs and carries out a good clinical trial (with full institutional review board approval) to find out. The well-constructed clinical trial with statistical analysis--that is science. Somebody saying "Yeah, I got a flu shot 16 years ago and a dog bit me!" is NOT science, and does not help anybody make informed decisions of any kind.

The development of the scientific method is the single most important event, IMO, since man crawled out of the swamps. Science lets us *test* questions, it lets us test one intervention against another (or against no intervention.) Science gives us answers, and lets us make informed decisions. Science makes it possible for the doctor to say to you, "Your type of leukemia is XX% likely to give you 5-year survival with standard chemo; ablative chemo plus stem cell rescue increases the efficacy to XX% but has a X% of mortality in the first 3 months."

So now you have, thanks to science, a clear understanding of what the relative risks and benefits are. You would NOT have this without the scientific method and scientific research. Without it you'd have a doctor saying, "Well my uncle knows a guy who got cured by eating peach pits ..." Anecdotal evidence is why George Washington was bled to death by doctors--they had no science, they had unverified myths that bleeding the sick helped them.

And to bring my TLDR boring sermon back around to the point: we KNOW via scientific research that the flu shot reduces your chance of getting the flu, saves lives, reduces hospitalization rates, and gives you 3-D vision and automatic shoes. Unless you have a proven significant contraindication, getting that flu shot is GOOD for you, and we KNOW it.

 

[ZaZara]

Twitterfeed 17-052019 from Lindsey Fitzharris @DrLindseyFitz

(1/10) Today is the 270th birthday of #EdwardJenner, pioneer of vaccination who arguably saved more lives than anyone else in history. Here’s a THREAD

in his honour. (Photo of two children - one vaccinated against smallpox, the other not - from @DrJennersHouse. Follow them!).

(2/10) Smallpox is one of the deadliest & most contagious diseases known to man. The virus killed over half a billion people in the twentieth century alone—three times the number of deaths from all of the century’s wars combined.

(3/10) On 8 May 1980, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the eradication of smallpox. This was an unprecedented event in history, signaling the first and only annihilation of a human disease.

(4/10) It has since been hailed the single greatest humanitarian achievement of all time. The victory—which saved tens of millions of lives—fulfilled the lifelong dream Edward Jenner, who first tested his vaccine on 14 May 1796.

(5/10) Jenner noticed that dairymaids who contracted cowpox never developed smallpox. Working from this, he developed a vaccine from cowpox. Indeed, the word “vaccination,” coined by Jenner in 1796, is derived from the Latin root vaccinus, meaning "of or from the cow.”

(6/10) The prominent Scottish physician Sir Walter Farquhar advised Jenner that if he kept the nature of the vaccine a secret, it could yield him a nest egg of as much as £100,000. But Jenner nurtured no such ambitions.

(7/10) In 1798, he had a windowless hut built in his garden & christened it the TEMPLE OF VACCINIA. It not only became a beacon of hope for the poor who sought protection against smallpox, but it was also the site of the first public health service in Britain.

(8/10) Though he never left his own country, Jenner became celebrated as a savior the world over. In 1805, Napoleon made vaccination compulsory for his French armies and awarded a medal to Jenner in spite of the fact that his country was at war with Britain.

(9/10) Thomas Jefferson also sang Jenner's praises after he received a phial of the vaccine which allowed him to vaccinate eighteen members of his own family. In a letter to Jenner, the third president of the United States wrote: “mankind can never forget that you have lived.”

(10/10) The concept of vaccination dates back much further than most people realize. You can visit @DrJennersHouse and the Temple of Vaccinia today. Follow them for more #medhist, and consider donating to the museum on #EdwardJenner’s birthday:


BBM

 

[ZaZara]

The world before vaccines is a world we can’t afford to forget

The world before vaccines is a world we can’t afford to forget
Measles is now resurgent in the United States and many other countries. Historical amnesia is partly to blame.

Like most American children of my generation, I lined up with my classmates in the mid-1950s to get the first vaccine for polio, then causing 15,000 cases of paralysis and 1,900 deaths a year in the United States, mostly in children. Likewise, we lined up for the vaccine against smallpox, then still causing millions of deaths worldwide each year.
(...)

Having grown up in the shadow of polio (my uncle was on crutches for life), and having made first-hand acquaintance with measles (I was part of the pre-vaccine peak year of 1958, along with 763,093 other young Americans), I’ve happily rolled up my sleeve for any vaccine recommended by my doctor and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with extra input for foreign travel from the CDC Yellow Book. I am deeply grateful to vaccines for keeping me alive and well, and also for helping me return from field trips as healthy as when I set out.

One result of this willingness, however, is that I suffer, like most people, from a notorious Catch-22: Vaccines save us from diseases, then cause us to forget the diseases from which they save us. Once the threat appears to be gone from our lives, we become lax. Or worse, we make up other things to worry about.

(...)

And so, parents forget, or more likely never knew, that 33 of every 100,000 people who experienced actual measles ended up with mental retardation or central nervous system damage. (That’s in addition to those who died.)

They forget that an outbreak of rubella in the early 1960s resulted in 20,000 children being born with brain damage, including autism, and other congenital abnormalities.

They forget that, before it was eradicated by a vaccine in the 1970s, smallpox left many survivors blind, maimed, or brain damaged. (Read how the vaccine for smallpox was invented.)

One remedy for this Catch-22 is to make a conscious effort to remind ourselves about the world before vaccines. Tdap, for instance, is a recurring but somewhat puzzling item on my immunization card. (Children get a slightly different formulation called DTaP.) The "T" is for tetanus and the "P" for pertussis, or whooping cough. But I was totally ignorant about the "D" for diphtheria.

Even doctors now tend to know the disease only from textbooks. But before the development of an effective vaccine in the early 1940s, diphtheria was among the great terrors of childhood. It killed more than 3,000 young Americans one year in the mid-1930s, when my parents were in high school. It is once again killing children today in Venezuela, Yemen, and other areas where social and political upheaval have disrupted the delivery of vaccine.


BBM

Highly recommended article with interesting graphs that I cannot copy.

 

[Tugela]

The problem is that when people don't experience something themselves they tend to think that it is not real, it is something hypothetical that has no bearing on their life.

You see the same sort of thing with people pining for the "good old days", but they don't realize that those days were not really that good and you don't have to go back very far in history for when things were a LOT worse than they are today. For example, the concept of an effective organized police force is really less than a hundred years old. Long enough for almost everyone alive now to not have experienced the old days when policing was virtually non existent (except for the rich), so they cannot comprehend it.

 

[Tugela]

Yep, get your flue shot - it works well at 47%, then falls off to 29%. What was it P. T. Barnum used to say?

My opinion only

Better than 0%, which is the other option.

 

[Tugela]

To me there are two things to look at when it comes to the flu shot. For me personally, it is not effective. I rarely get sick because I am a carrier. The people around me I think should get them because I will bring all kinds of germs around me. Sure, I wash my hands a lot and am careful because I know I am a carrier.

There is no such thing as a "carrier" when it comes to the flu. You are either immune (in which case you don't get infected at all) or you are not (in which case you get sick).

 

[ZaZara]

Author Roald Dahl on the death of his eldest daughter Olivia, who died when she was seven years old from measles encephalitis in 1962.

November 1962 - death of Roald Dahl's daughter Olivia

 

[ColyH]

I have only gotten a flu shot a few times in my life. Most winters I get at least a severe cold but last winter I didn't get a flu shot and never got sick. I think flu shots are hit and miss.

 

[firebird]

I have only gotten a flu shot a few times in my life. Most winters I get at least a severe cold but last winter I didn't get a flu shot and never got sick. I think flu shots are hit and miss.

Flu shots are a big pharma scam, imo. If you're elderly or health compromised, I guess consider it. But otherwise, there's a better chance you won't get the flu or, if you do, you'll be fine in a couple of days. I've never had a flu shot and have had the actual flu twice. It was miserable for a few days, then gone.

 

[Craig24]

The thing about influenza vaccines is this: The WHO and CDC make an educated guess about which strains of influenza will be prevalent during the next season. They choose the three or four most likely strains, and the vaccine is manufactured containing antibodies against those strains.

HOWEVER, there are thousands of strains of influenza - and if they guess wrong, even immunized persons can and often do get 'the flu'.

So yes, it is entirely possible to get a flu shot and then come down with influenza.

YES! I try to explain this to people every year.

 

[BetteDavisEyes]

‘This year may be worse than usual,' doctor says of flu season

4-year-old who died tested positive for virus

Health officials are hinting that this flu season could be worse than normal after the first pediatric flu-associated death has been reported earlier than normal.

Officials from the Riverside University Health System in California said in a news release earlier this month that a 4-year-old child who recently died tested positive for influenza.

Though the child had underlying health issues, Dr. Cameron Kaiser said we should never forget that the flu can kill...

 

[Indy Anna]

Whether you decide on the vaccine or against it is a personal decision.

If you have the flu, please stay isolated as much as possible. If being in public is necessary wearing a mask is common courtesy.

The two occasions I have come down with severe flu followed recent trips to the doctors office where I was exposed to the virus.

I got a flu shot for the first time at the doctor's office Wednesday. I haven't gotten one in the past because they contained a preservative I'm allergic to. This time, the nurse assured me it was preservative-free so I decided it would be a good idea to get it.

Yesterday, I was feeling so sick--mostly congestion and achiness (feeling a bit better today). I believe a dead virus is used in the flu shot, so it can't give anyone the flu. I thought it was strange that I got sick right after getting the shot, though, but then I remembered the previous time I went to the doctor I started feeling sick a few hours later. So, I guess I'm picking up viruses when I go to the doctor (and it's in a brand new building!).

Some doctor's offices post signs asking patients to tell the desk clerk right away if you have flu or cold symptoms so they can take you back to an exam room to wait, rather than spread germs in the waiting room. Wearing a mask in public (even to the doctor's office) while exhibiting flu or cold symptoms will help to stop the spread of viruses. Thank you for that recommendation!

 

[beatrixpotter]

I'm not sure it's even possible to catch and show symptoms of a cold within 3 hours of exposure. I'd love to see some research on that. But I'd wager you are far more likely to be reacting something you were literally injected internally with vs something that only hit your nasal cavity 3 hours before. Anyone know of any research on this?

 

[beatrixpotter]

"Symptoms of a common cold usually appear one to three days after exposure to a cold-causing virus."
Common cold - Symptoms and causes

 

[Indy Anna]

I'm not sure it's even possible to catch and show symptoms of a cold within 3 hours of exposure. I'd love to see some research on that. But I'd wager you are far more likely to be reacting something you were literally injected internally with vs something that only hit your nasal cavity 3 hours before. Anyone know of any research on this?

It was more than 3 hours both times, but less than 24 hours.

 

[Indy Anna]

"Symptoms of a common cold usually appear one to three days after exposure to a cold-causing virus."
Common cold - Symptoms and causes

The Merck Manual also gives an incubation period of 1-3 days for cold viruses.

Common Cold - Infectious Diseases - Merck Manuals Professional Edition

The incubation period for influenza is 1-4 days.

Influenza - Infectious Diseases - Merck Manuals Professional Edition

More on the Flu/Flu shots:

Initially, the flu may seem like a common cold with a runny nose, sneezing and sore throat. But colds usually develop slowly, whereas the flu tends to come on suddenly. And although a cold can be a nuisance, you usually feel much worse with the flu.

Common signs and symptoms of the flu include:

• Fever over 100.4 F (38 C)
• Aching muscles
• Chills and sweats
• Headache
• Dry, persistent cough
• Fatigue and weakness
• Nasal congestion
• Sore throat

Can the vaccine give me the flu?

No. The flu vaccine can't give you the flu. But you might develop flu-like symptoms — despite getting a flu vaccine — for a variety of reasons, including:

• Reaction to the vaccine. Some people experience muscle aches and a fever for a day or two after receiving a flu vaccine. This may be a side effect of your body's production of protective antibodies.
• The two-week window. It takes about two weeks for the flu shot to take full effect. If you're exposed to the influenza virus shortly before or during that time period, you might catch the flu.
• Mismatched flu viruses. In some years, the influenza viruses used for the vaccine don't match the viruses circulating during the flu season. If this occurs, your flu shot will be less effective, but may still offer some protection.
• Other illnesses. Many other illnesses, such as the common cold, also produce flu-like symptoms. So you may think you have the flu when you actually don't.

Flu shot: Your best bet for avoiding influenza