As the season for influenza (commonly known as the flu) approaches, recommendations for flu jabs emerge. There are plenty of good reasons to try to avoid getting the flu – it makes you feel terrible, with aches, a cough and a fever. You may even end up in the hospital. Every year, more people die from influenza than from all other vaccine-preventable diseases combined. In the United Kingdom, 3,000 to 4,000 people die from influenza each year, and 250,000 to 500,000 people worldwide die from influenza annually.
The National Health Service currently recommends the influenza vaccine (the flu jab) every year for the following individuals: adults who are sixty-five and older, health and socialwork professionals, adults and children with long-term medical conditions, and poultry workers.
Someone may have told you that getting the flu jab would give you the flu. This is an outright lie. The flu jab uses a dead virus to protect you from influenza. Dead viruses cannot make you ill. Dead viruses cannot be resurrected to cause infections. They are dead. We know someone out there will probably be arguing with us right now – maybe someone who thinks that the flu jab gave them the flu in the past, but it didn’t happen.
If you’ve ever thought that your flu jab caused you to get the flu, you probably just experienced a bad side effect from the vaccine. The vaccine can cause soreness, redness and swelling where you get the shot. Some people also experience some low-grade fever and aches. This is not the flu. This is just the lousy part of getting a vaccination (though it might save your life). Second, you might have got ill right after the flu jab coincidentally. You may have been exposed to any other virus around that time or even to the influenza virus itself before you were injected. When you get a jab and get ill at the same time, it is natural to put two and two together and assume that one caused the other. But, once again, this is the difference between causation and association. Even if they happened at the same time, one event did not necessarily cause the other.
There are a few people who should not get flu jabs. If you have an allergy to chicken eggs, if you have had a serious allergic reaction to a previous flu jab, if you had the rare condition Guillain-Barre syndrome after a previous flu jab, or if you have a moderate or severe illness with a fever at the time that you want the jab, you should not be vaccinated.
What about the newer nasal-spray version of the flu vaccine? The nasal-spray influenza vaccine does not contain the dead virus; it uses a live, attenuated virus. While the virus in this vaccine is not dead, it is a special, genetically modified version of the virus specifically designed not to cause infection. It can never revert back to the original virus that can cause infection (the ‘wild type’). This has never happened – not in scientific studies or in the millions of people who have had the influenza nasal-spray vaccine since 2003. Still, some people worry that the nasal-spray version of the influenza vaccine can come out of your nose and be transmitted to someone else. Shedding of the vaccine from the nose can occur, but the amount of vaccine virus that comes from your nose is incredibly small – much less than the amount needed to infect someone. And, in many studies, transmission of this attenuated vaccine virus has only been seen in one person. One child (in a study of 197 children) had influenza from someone else’s vaccine detected in their nose in a single day, but it never caused any symptoms. In other studies, no one transmitted the vaccine virus at all. Even among HIV-infected children and adults, who would be at a higher risk for infection, no one was infected.
The moral of this myth-busting story: get a flu jab!