BUT it's common side effects are nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, fever, upset stomach, sore throat, weak muscles, tiredness and a general feeling of malaise that can last for 2-5 days following receiving of the shot.....
BOY AM I GLAD that the flu shot doesn't give you the flu....
CCLDof TX9:36AM March 11, 2012
Steve - please stop spreading paranoid misinformation. This is the exact wording from the Cochrane analysis:
"MAIN RESULTS: We included 50 reports. Forty (59 sub-studies) were clinical trials of over 70,000 people. Eight were comparative non-RCTs and assessed serious harms. Two were reports of harms which could not be introduced in the data analysis. In the relatively uncommon circumstance of vaccine matching the viral circulating strain and high circulation, 4% of unvaccinated people versus 1% of vaccinated people developed influenza symptoms (risk difference (RD) 3%, 95% confidence interval (CI) 2% to 5%). The corresponding figures for poor vaccine matching were 2% and 1% (RD 1, 95% CI 0% to 3%). These differences were not likely to be due to chance. Vaccination had a modest effect on time off work and had no effect on hospital admissions or complication rates. Inactivated vaccines caused local harms and an estimated 1.6 additional cases of Guillain-Barré Syndrome per million vaccinations. The harms evidence base is limited."
In other words, the benefit of vaccine is small, and the chance of harm of vaccine is very small. In making a decision for myself, my family and my patients, why wouldn't I at least consider something that has more of a chance of benefit than harm? Isn't that the whole point of trying to stay healthy, to do things that are more likely to be helpful than harmful? Vaccines are not perfect; nobody ever claimed them to be; they are part of a larger prevention strategy; and they are better than not vaccinating. Simple.
And I do NOT financially benefit from vaccines being used, if you are wondering; I see patients hospitalized with infections, so if anything, my partners and I would benefit more if more people got sick and were hospitalized.
In terms of the vitamin D thing, readers should be aware of a few things: (1) this benefit was shown in only one study, and has yet to be reproduced (to my knowledge), (2) it was studied only in pediatric patients, and (3) the "800%" figure is purposefully used to be misleading. The numbers used to arrive at that figure are apples and oranges; the flu reduction seen in these kids was from a case rate of 18.% to 10.5% over four months, if high doses of vitamin D were given (an 8% absolute risk reduction). This 8% figure is then compared to a stated 1% reduction in influenza symptoms from other studies, but those were studies of adults, and the "1%" was a figure arrived at by looking at SYMPTOMS, not ILLNESS, and was only in years in which the vaccine strain didn't match the circulating virus strains. So the big conclusion is that, in an unlucky year in which you're vaccinated against a strain of influenza that turns out not to be the predominant strain, the vaccine doesn't protect you from flu symptoms? Shocker.
Please get your facts straight before you post.
Scottof NJ11:24AM March 10, 2012
The belief that a seasonal flu shot is effective would actually require sound science, and the Cochrane Collaboration from Rome who are considered the "Gold Standard" of science-based evidence have concluded after looking at hundreds of flu studies that the flu vaccine offers zero percent benefit during average years, and at most a 4% difference in years where the strains match exactly...which is very rare in itself.
The conclusion is, there is simply no good reason to take the flu shot. Vitamin D3 levels being sustained has been shown in double-blind studies to be over 800% more effective at preventing influenza A than the vaccine.
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CCLD of TX 9:36AM March 11, 2012
Scott of NJ 11:24AM March 10, 2012
Steve of NY 9:28AM March 10, 2012