Flu vaccines for school age kids

[Skdkhvyvrhej]

Son has just started school and being offered flu jabs for first time at school.

Can I just say this is not an antivax discussion. My children are fully vaccinated in all other areas including chickenpox.

I am questioning whether to consent to the flu jabs or not. Having remembered about research I read many moons ago about childhood exposure being very important to adulthood illness rates. Ie. They could tell which age groups would be most or less ill based on the strains that circulated in their younger years.

So have been doing some research and found this paper… https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1755436518300732

What I am struggling to unpick is that this is based on a population level… I cannot say whether my children will get very ill from flu; nor can I say whether the vaccines will be a good match in all these years - and if not does that increase their risk; both now and in the future.

It’s slightly boggling my mind and feels like a gamble either way. Has anyone looked at this and what did you decide?

Flu is horrendous and young children are at greater risk of complications. And they are spreaders.

my kids have it every year and ever since flu caused me to lose my hearing so have I

DC has had it every year it’s been offered, I used to have it when my employer offered it privately for free. We’ve no reason to think the flu jab will harm us so why not?
We now live with an elderly relative so take as many precautions as we can to keep them healthy.

The way I see it giving the flu vaccination annually builds up a large number of 'building blocks' that can be reconfigured or adjusted depending on what the dominant strain in any particular year looks like. So by keeping up to date with vaccinations while they are young and fit and healthy and the vaccination is freely available and will likely have minimal or no side effects gives them the tools to fight flu later in life when they may not be so fit, healthy and able to fight it without help.

I also believe in working together as a society and that by vaccinating my kids (and myself i pay privately) i help to protect the most vulnerable in society with little to no cost to myself.

Well you sound lovely. Presumably you also refuse to treat your patients if they are ill due to them eating too much/smoking etc because they didn’t do anything to help themselves?

We do vaccinate for flu. I'm not really thinking about the population effects, it was never about protecting the elderly for me but protecting my child from 2 weeks off school followed by several weeks of feeling drained and awful. I had proper full on flu once as a very young adult and it was horrendous.

There is a big national programme in place for the young, older and more vulnerable people so overall the cost benefit favours offering the vaccination, and I don't have any qualms about taking it up. We've paid for a vax for my eldest for a few years as an older teen and I was especially keen the year she went off to uni. Flu may not take many young people's lives but it can wreck a school term for them.

No I understand what she is saying.

I did more reading on this last night. The main purpose of this scheme is to protect the elderly. https://inews.co.uk/news/the-changes-coming-to-flu-jabs-for-children-4770272?app=true&srsltid=AU7gw4Uxg6ZDUi0ZGNFnZbdufj339ZNMDBUdRWD36pEdofqk9Ilun14

In short—
As a philosophical view - I 100% believe children come before adults. They are our future.

On a practical view - it’s not damaging to them in short term to have this vaccination. It’s actually beneficial short term. But the benefits do have a longer term cost - both individually to some immunity range and at population level that it can cause bursts of worst epidemics if the jab is not matching or available.

In long—-
Kids have the nasal spray. Vulnerable adults the jab.

The nasal spray is different to the jab. Nasal spray is weakened live and gives a better immune response in the airways (ie. Where you pick it up). Ie. The immune response is in the mucus. Interesting that the range of long term immune cells are more diverse so more useful in the future than jab cells.

I assume this is why PP says it’s very good at being effective at stopping people getting ill, but some do still get very ill (because they were unlucky it went past the upper airways and went systemic). I did read the nasal is still good at stopping very very serious consequences ie. Death.

Clinically at risk people have the flu jab - even children. It’s completely different. It’s dead virus. And stimulates a systemic immune response in the bloodstream. The nasal might not work on them. They NEED the jab - not the nasal. They cannot rely on herd protection because we never have that. That’s too risky.

So if those who need to be vaccinated are. Then the only concern should be what is best for the individual child.

My brother in law is a genetic scientist, and for what it's worth he always gave his kids the flu vaccines.

I think there are reasons young kids and the elderly are considered vulnerable in this way enough to be given the spray to protect them. The NHS don't spend all this money because its not needed. Even if you were kicking the flu down the road to their young adulthood (I am skeptical about this assumption anyway as I am not sure I've ever actually had the flu and I'm in my 40s) the older body is much better equipped to handle it.

I used to work with someone who had been a university administrator, he said every year in October usually, sometimes September the flu arrived and infected dozens of students. The staff knowing about this all got jabbed in September.
I guess this vaccination process is all about how it affects each of us.
Some people are more motivated by being a good citizen and not wanting older adults or medically vulnerable people to catch it.
It is an interesting thing fear of vaccines, I used to not understand it at all but I see it now as a type of belief. Like religion or politics. I dont think I have ever convinced anyone to get a flu jab who was anti vax, belief is a powerful thing.

I think anyone who wonders whether they should get the flu jab has never actually had flu before.

I've had it once when I was 19 and fairly fit and healthy. It put me in bed for a week. I couldn't stay awake for the length of a movie. I didn't eat anything for a week because it was too much effort to chew. It took a full 6 weeks to shake off the fatigue.

If I can prevent my DD's from getting that, especially when they're smaller and less robust then I'm doing so. In addition, we have some elderly family members who, if they catch flu, are either not likely to pull through or would be weakened so badly as a result that it would affect their quality of life. So we also get it for them.

It's a nasal spray for the kids. They line up in school and get a couple of squirts up the nose. DD says it tickles.

We all have the flu vaccination every year.

I had flu once, was hospitalised with double pneumonia, hallucinated with the fevers and nearly died. It took months to recover from the post viral fatigue. That was as a young, fit and healthy person!

We have older relatives with cancer and babies in the wider family. I don't want anyone to be as unwell as I was if it can be avoided. So the whole family is vaccinated every year.

Vaccine IS exposure. Just a bit different.
All healthy adults here, 3 are younger adults. We pay for all of us for it privately in a local pharmacy as soon as it's available.
Every year.
Nobody has any health anxiety. It's just quite easy to get it when passing a pharmacy, costs around £20, potentially can lighten your symptoms. Why not?
Still you might get horrible cold but then you know it's cold.
I don't know why you wouldn't get it when NHS thinks it's so useful that they will pay for it.

Btw as an update still not 100% decided but do think we will go ahead with the spray.

It would be a no to the Jab.

But from what I am reading the spray does expose you to a live safe version of flu every year and so you can build that library of what that looks like.

Interesting, why yes nasal spray and no to jab?

I have two DC. One has the Jab, the other has the Spray. Just different means to the same end. Yes the jab hurts a bit when it's done. But gives the same effect, the body can recognize what the virus looks like and figure out how it might fight it ready for when its needed.

Viruses mutate all the time which is why the flu vaccine doesn’t actually prevent them catching it, but it does reduce the severity if they do. Every year the vaccine is different, scientists look at the last strain and create this year’s vaccine based on various factors and strains over the years taking into account the mutations from this year. Older people and babies would be benefited from the vaccine greatly as they would not get very sick if they caught it. The reason people (and children) are hospitalised is usually from complications like secondary pneumonia, respiratory distress and the virus affecting organs. The vaccination in theory should reduce severity of disease and subsequently complications requiring hospitalisation.
It’s a personal decision regarding whether or not you wish to vaccinate your child. It won’t guarantee that they’ll not catch ‘flu but there is strong empirical evidence that symptoms and duration will be reduced.
(DH is an internal medicine Dr).
I vaccinated my kids until they were 5 and I don’t now, although every year I have an internal debate about it! I’m not crazy about vaccinating children with anything other than the scheduled ones, and I’m not crazy about vaccinating against viruses. That’s my own preference based on my own research and I’m certainly not going to push my views about this subject on anyone!

They are different.

As far as I understand it…

The jab only triggers creation of specific antibodies to match the specific outer proteins. So it’s very specific to that years prediction and does not offer long term coverage.

The nasal spray offers a more realistic version of natural immunity. It triggers a range of immune cells to respond. B cells/ T cells antigens not just to the outer casing, but a recognition of internal proteins and replication .

It has been designed and is specifically given to children to try to minimise the problem I was talking about - which now I have done reading seems to be referred to as ‘borrow now - pay later’ theory, or using the scientific terms is to do with antigen imprinting or OAS (Original antigenic sin); that the first exposure to something being incredibly important to how your body responds for ever more.

If your child is being offered jab then I assume there’s a reason and at risk people do need the jab. It offers systemic bloodstream protection; unlike the nasal which is mucus membranes in nose and throat only.

Thank you, this was my initial instinct about it.

It’s very hard to research this because there is so much hyperbole around this it’s hard to cut through.

Wish my husband was a dr to make the decision 😂

Yeah! But even Drs struggle with things like this because as I said, it’s so personal. For example, he was pretty adamant that the kids didn’t get the Covid jab because it seemed to trigger genetically predisposed auto immune disease, and one child has active Coeliac and the other has the exact same gene but no Coeliac. He had no empirical evidence (mainly because Drs were prevented from documenting issues regarding vaccines but let’s not go there..) but he strongly believed that it was unnecessary in our case.

My little girl nearly died because of the flu before she was 2yrs old. It was terrifying. I have had the flu and I felt so awful. I literally lost 2 and half weeks of no memory I was so ill. The recovery was brutal and left weak for months after.

I’m in the US so probably different, but it seems to me that most kids get a flu shot. I do childcare and that’s certainly been the case for most of the kids I’ve cared for.

it wasn’t as much of a thing when my kids were young and two of my kids came down with flu and were banished from school for a week! They did get Tamiflu within 48 hours and made a miraculous recovery, but still couldn’t attend school.

Oh yes! The Covid jab made absolutely no sense for kids. That was a no brainer. I understand in your circumstances it’s more tricky.

But for for all kids that made no sense. So much so I started to get a big tin foil hat and consider - are they just doing this because kids are the only control group we have left (ie.non vaxed).

Thankfully we didn’t end up doing it in the uk. It took me 4 years to get Covid vac allergic reaction added on my record. Over the course of two pregnancies and being asked that question numerous times.

Yeah, the Covid thing was a moral and ethical nightmare - also for medical staff! And despite what we were told quite regularly about the vaccine being safe, it literally hadn’t been tested properly on children long term, and Drs very quickly realised that it wasn’t preventing contagion anyway. There’s a whole thing about this that I’m not willing to talk about on this forum, but let’s just say, it wasn’t black and white and being coerced into making medical decision for our children without having adequate information was questionable to say the least!

This is interesting too. What I guess is hard to tell is whether you have been exposed to flu or not as a child. I know people can also get it with no symptoms or milder symptoms than what people would usually think of as flu.

We’ve all had this year’s jab already in our family and have it every year. To protect ourselves and also elderly family. Eldest DD has an underlying condition and has had the injection every year since she was a baby. She can’t have the nasal spray. None of us had any side effects, not even a sore arm this year. I never hesitate to have it.

It’s a spray. I also know a perfectly healthy child who
got encephalitis as a result of the flu. I don’t understand why people wouldn’t want to protect their kids.