Ok, enough people have asked me about this that I’ll answer here. And please know that I’m not a doctor, a flu specialist, or any kind of medical professional. This is just my own line of reasoning.
So, I accept the science that you can’t get the flu from the shot, but anecdotally I’ve gotten sick almost every time I’ve gotten it.
I understand that I didn’t get the flu each time (you’d know if you had the flu, because you’d feel like you were dead), but I still got sick.
Basically every time.
[ Jan 3, 2018 — Someone linked to a great story that confirmed my theory on this. Basically, while you’re body is building immunity to flu you will get cold symptoms. AKA, you get sick. ]
So when I hear that it’s not very effective at stopping the Flu, and I never really get the flu anyway, I have to ask whether I want to almost definitely get sick (from something else) in order to lower my chances of getting the actual flu by some percentage.
I think the answer might usually be no, but perhaps this year might be a yes since it seems so bad.
Again, I would actually have to model this out to know for sure.
I’d factor in how bad it sucks to be the not-flu-sick, with a likelihood, and assign a risk score to that. And then I’d take the chances of avoiding getting the flu if I get the shot, and factor in how bad it’d be to get it, and then I’d produce a YES/NO answer.
But I don’t have that data, or even enough to guess at it.
So my current position is that I’m not going to take it I’m going to start taking it from now on.
[ Jan 3, 2018 — Because of a number of comments to this post, I think I’m going to change my policy and get the flu shot every year. I’ll just plan on being sick for a couple of days, and will consider it taking it for the herd immunity team. ]
