I have been getting flu shots for years now and I would have to guess that I do not get the flu because I am getting the shot but this year I am not so sure. Crazy paranoid maybe but we will see ovr the next few weeks what happens.
First of all the annual flu shot is a bit of a crapshoot. last spring or maybe even eealier there is a group of researchers that would have gotten together and decided what their best guess was for the strains of flu that would pop up this winter. Usually these researchers do well and often they still get it wrong.
I am not sure what the side effects of the flu shot really are for me and for everyone they will be different but what I do know if that I have not had more than a 24 hour bug over the last few years and I am never sure if this is good or not. Does this mean I may be more susceptible to other illnesses? I saw a report last week saying that people that got the flu shot last year are twice as likely this year to get H1N1 flu.
This takes us also to the H1N1 shot. As a family even though we have always gotten an annual flu shot I believe that we are going to skip the vaccination for H1 N1 Swine Flu. The shot is radically different than the flu shots that have been done for the regular flu shots for the last 20 years and have been not fully tested on humans as the testing cycle has been very short.
I will not encourage the crazy conspiracy theorists but there are many people outside of the medical community that are nervous about the Swine Flu vaccine as there just is not the rigor around it with the fear of last Spring coming back again and the drug companies racing this summer to get a vaccine out and possibly cutting corners to do so.
Are you getting vaccinated once or twice this fall? What are your views on flu shots?