How do you flu?

Flu jabs : yay or nay?

4 min readSep 21, 2018

The NHS offers the flu jab for free to:

are 65 years of age or over
are pregnant
have certain medical conditions
are living in a long-stay residential care home or other long-stay care facility
receive a carer’s allowance, or you are the main carer for an elderly or disabled person whose welfare may be at risk if you fall ill
children over the age of 6 months with a long-term health condition
children aged 2 and 3 on August 31 2018 — that is, born between September 1 2014 and August 31 2016
children in reception class and school years 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5
Frontline health and social care workers are also eligible to receive the flu vaccine. It is your employer’s responsibility to arrange and pay for this vaccine.

Despite this, last year fewer than half of adults who were eligible received the vaccination, and even lower uptake was reported for children.

If you are healthy, flu can be a nasty virus that you recover from after a week or two. But that is a week or two of being ill, not able to work (or if you have dragged yourself in to spread the virus, not able to work as productively as if you were healthy), not able to function well at home. It all adds up, you lose pay, or you work and come home too unwell to prepare decent meals, meaning more money spent on “easy” foods. Before you know it, you realise you have been paying money to feel horrible.

That’s just you though. Those who can’t have the vaccination, those who have lowered immune systems, the elderly… for those people it isn’t a mild, slightly pricey inconvenience. For those people it is a serious illness, with added complications of contracting bronchitis and pneumonia, and potentially causing death.

After speaking with DocHQ followers, the common reasons we found for refusing were:

I felt very ill afterwards. I never get the flu without it, so why have the week of feeling terrible?
It only protects against the types they have predicted, so there’s no guarantee anyway.

Scientists work each year to try to predict the most likely strain of flu viruses that will be most prevalent in the coming winter. The vaccination is then created to defend against those types. It is not possible to vaccinate from all strains but getting the most likely still gives much more of a fighting chance for you to get through unscathed.

You cannot get the flu from the injected vaccine. The injected flu vaccine does not give you the live virus, but rather part of the dead virus — the part that you need to make an immune response to. The nasal spray is a live vaccine, but the virus is greatly weakened, again ensuring that you cannot catch the virus from the immunisation.

Many times, the illness after the flu vaccine is just a normal illness that would have occurred anyway, but when you are ill, you tend to want to know why and your brain connects to the most likely closest option — in this case, the flu jab.

Up to half of people carry the virus, without displaying any symptoms. The people who never get flu could well be unknowingly contagious, passing it on to the less fortunate.

Only 68.7% of front-line NHS workers took up the flu vaccine last year. Leaving over 30% of the workers who are in positions where they will be in contact with the most vulnerable people, potentially infecting them.

Flu admissions accounted for about a third of the increase in emergency admissions last winter, putting a massive, and in many cases preventable, strain on the NHS.

Some countries, such as Australia, are considering making the vaccination compulsory for care workers.

Do you think that they should be made compulsory in the UK?

Do you encourage your employees to take preventative action such as flu vaccinations where they are eligible?

Would you like your employer to provide flu vaccinations?

We’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Sources:

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/qa/misconceptions.htm — This site provides links to significant scientific reports about the misconceptions of the flu vaccines.

https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/flu-shot-guidelines-for-adults#1

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/vaccinations/who-should-have-flu-vaccine/