I don't trust the "Flu-Vaccine"...Never have, never will...I havent had the Flu since I was kid...They give out Flu shots on my job every year and my 45yr old Co-worker gets one annually..She gets sick after the shot then eventually starts feeling better...
In a way the whole vaccine thing is like a game of Russian roulette with a couple million chambers in the cylinder. In any population, for any given stimulus, there will be individuals out on the statistical fringes, where some will react badly, and others will react superbly. It's even possible a vaccine could trigger a mutation -- in fact given the amount of viral DNA we seem to have in our genome, it's almost certainly happened in the past.
A friend of my parents faithfully got his flu shot every year after he turned 55, until one when he decided he was just too busy. That was the year he got the flu, and it turned into pneumonia. But most people never get the flu whether they get the shot or not; applying any individual's experience to the effectiveness of the vaccine is useless -- it's a statistical thing.
I don't get the flu vaccine because I am in the prime of my healthy so to speak with a good immune system.
I also do not know the validity on what Kulindahr said about it preventing up to x-amounts of mutations of the virus, however I've always been of the school of thought that it was a redundant form of vaccine as it was designed from a previous mutation.
I guess I wasn't clear. The vaccine doesn't prevent mutations; the situation is that it takes more than one mutation to change the virus enough to where the body's immune system isn't prepared against the newcomer.
The premise of the annual flu shot is that no one year's mutation(s) will change the virus enough that a vaccine from the previous year's strains will protect everyone. I think the standard version is actually based on more than just the one year's main virus, to sort of cover the bases.
The one big fear is a virus that jumps from humans to livestock, mutates, then jumps back into the human population and spreads uninhibitedly. Viruses jump that way all the time, but they rarely turn out capable of jumping from human to human easily.
I saw an article where they were using statistical methods to try to guess which direction a virus might mutate. The goal was to be able to make a vaccine more able to meet what the new years might bring. Not everyone is convinced the idea is practical, the big reason being that if you put too many 'flavors' in one dose of vaccine, the body may not react to any of them at all enough to confer protection -- making the vaccine useless.
