Flu Shots – Good or Bad

I’m almost over this cold that my baby cousin was so gracious to share with me. The cold was the context for my previous post. It was Progresso chicken and rice soup and Premium unsalted crackers, and it was indeed quite tasty. The cold is also the inspiration for today’s question. What’s up with the flu shot. Personally, I’ve never had one, but I’ve taken my grandmother to get hers for the past four or five years. My limited knowledge of the flu shot is that… wait… this is the internet…

CDC Flu Shot Q & A <— link

hmmm… the Center for Disease Control basically just killed the thought provoking question I woke up with this morning which was… does the flu shot cause the flu… killed it like the three strains of virus that get injected into my grandmother’s arm each year. Before reading that FAQ which is quite easy to find with a simple search of “what is the flu shot”, I was aware that the flu shot was the flu virus itself, but I wasn’t certain about the virus being “inactivated (killed)”.

Of course if I was a true conspiracy theorist, this information could be easily dismissed as propaganda and I would continue to blog about how my grandmother promptly got the flu after each flu shot. I would then wonder how many people who were never vaccinated actually got the flu from people who did get the shot. I would also wonder (as I always have), how the manufacturers of the vaccine decide which strains to include in the shot each year.

oh well.