re: The Flu Vaccine - Pushing Hard

I take the vaccine for Strain A.

I contact strain B.

Does the vaccine for strain A, reduce the effects of strain B?

This is what I am asking.

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But why not take a chance that it does help? Its free/cheap, won't harm you, and helps reduce your risk of getting it by a fair amount.

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I have no logical response as to why I haven't.

I rarely get sick, so I guess I get that aura of feeling bulletproof.

Nurses comment about others is what actually got me thinking about getting one.

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There is literally no harm in at least getting the vaccination

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Lol. Do you really trust the govt? I don’t.
This vaccine is useless and hospitals get kick backs from the manufacturer for forcing their employees to get it.

No thanks. I refuse to get it and I’m not wearing a mask. I’ve never had the flu and I see hundreds of patients with it every year.

shite who do I trust? A Doc or a Nurse???

Dude....it’s a thread about the flu shot.

And I’m not the one that got his panties in a twist.

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Does the vaccine for strain A, reduce the effects of strain B?

This is what I am asking.

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Typically. Flu strains, while different, are often related and if you catch a different strain than is in the vaccine, you can still have a heightened immune response because they're sufficiently alike for your immune system to ramp up quicker than usual. Vaccines sensitize your immune system to pathogens so that it can immediately respond when the pathogen enters your body. If your immune system is very familiar with the pathogen and responds quickly enough, it kills the offender before it can reproduce enough to cause illness and you have immunity. It's not that the virus doesn't get into you and it's not that the virus doesn't start reproducing in you; your body just immediately spots the pathogen and sends in SEAL Team 6 to murder the frick out of the virus before the virus has a chance to gain a foothold.

However, a pathogen that is very similar to one you're vaccinated against can also trigger a heightened immune response. Perhaps it will not be quick enough to kill the virus before it can sicken you, but it can cause an immune response far quicker than your body normally would mount a response, lessening both the severity and length of the sickness. A great example of this is the smallpox vaccine, which does not actually vaccinate you against smallpox. It exposes you to a closely related live virus that causes very mild infection. The two viruses are so closely related that after vaccination, your body can recognize and attack smallpox virus before it can cause havoc, without ever having been exposed to smallpox. So closely related are several of these "pox" viruses that the "smallpox" vaccine protects you against them, as well. Not chickenpox, though. That's a completely different family of viruses.

A LOT goes into deciding which 4 strains are included in a season's vaccination. Public health experts discuss and come up with the four strains for inclusion that they think will be common in any given season that also have a high potential to cause severe disease. In other words, once they identify the short list of likely strains that can be expected to be prevalent in a season, if they're picking between an extremely infectious strain that causes mild disease or a slightly less infectious strain that causes lethal disease, they might decide to include the deadlier one that fewer people will get knowing that the tradeoff for heading off those severe illnesses and deaths is that the vaccine will protect fewer people against the milder version. Within those constraints, they might also try to pick strains for inclusion that are as unrelated as possible. The idea there is that if there are, to make up a number, 6 families of flu virus and you can only pick 4 strains for inclusion in the vaccine, you try to avoid picking all 4 strains from the same family if you can. The idea is that, if able, they try to make the included strains as varied to maximize the chances the vaccine will provide some level of improved immune response against strains not included. Basically, "don't put all your eggs in one basket".

In a fairy tale world, production capacity would be unlimited and cheap enough to create a yearly dose for everyone of a vaccine that could confer immunity against every strain of the flu. From an economics standpoint in the real world, doing that would consume more resources than just letting the flu do its thing, so it doesn't make sense. We try to strike a balance between risk and reward when it comes to the flu vaccine and the 4 strain killed virus vaccine strikes a decent balance between cost, efficacy, and the ability to create a new formulation and produce enough doses for every flu season.

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Dude everyone already knows you are an idiot so no one will take any post you make seriously.

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I thought about replying to his message, but just couldn't make myself continue to argue with someone so dumb

The conspiracy theory is (not that I believe it, but it is plausible) that the US government, recognizing the threat of biological weapons, needs a mechanism for rapid developing, mass-manufacturing and distributing of vaccines for war/terror (or perhaps natural) biological incidents. It would be too expensive to maintain the facilities/personnel etc to keep the "machine" ready immediately, indefinitely. The solution (brilliant, actually) is to direct the pharmaceutical companies to constantly produce vaccines, like the annual flu shot, and promise to encourage everyone to get the vaccine, which is typically covered by insurance (and cost indirectly transferred to customers). Even though the flu vaccine is typically less than 40% effective, the mechanism scheme socially attacks anyone who questions the necessity of the vaccine.

Its brilliant. It works.

This isn't my tin foil hat, I'm just passing along the theory.

Yet, you have no basis for telling people to get the shot other than, "It might protect you", which is what you've been told. You know that it can harm people. It could be altering immune systems, which would make people who get the shot more prone to get the flu.

I hadn't heard so many people freaking out about the flu until after some company decided that flu shots were the end-all-be-all. Adults just rarely got it. Now, the only adults I hear about getting it are ones that had the shot.

Do you have a chart from say....2010 to 2018 showing the total number of cases of the flu in the US by age group? On the same chart, I'd also like to see the total percentage of people (by age group) who got vaccinated