No to flu vaccine

[CuriousMummyy]

NOT an anti-vaxxer here.. my kids are vaccinated otherwise.

Buttttt there's just something about the yearly flu vaccine. Anyone else not letting their kids get it?

If so, why not?

Ah yes the scientific 'something about it'.

DS always gets it, why wouldn't you? More children are hospitalised and die from flu every year than from side effects from the nasal spray.

For Most kids and adults it's a cold but it can be really debilitating so anything that cuts the risk of hospital stays and sepsis is worth doing imho.

No, it isn't. It really isn't @WarriorN
If it "just feels like a cold" then it isn't flu, it's a cold. I don't think you have ever had flu.

Proper flu is really debilitating even for the most healthy individuals. Have you heard of the £10 note analogy?

If you can get out of bed to pick up a £10 outside of your home then it is a cold. If you are too ill to get out of bed to do so then it could be flu.

Actually that isn't true. As a (recently retired)GP our practice was one of many who were in a scheme swabbed different cohorts of patients and encouraged patients to voluntarily swab themselves if they had respiratory illnesses. This was done to give an idea of the circulating viruses in the community.
We had several influenza A and B positive swabs from people who really weren't that unwell so you can definitely have flu and post on Mumsnet! The problem is these are the spreaders of the illness to more vulnerable people.

Sorry - wrong post for me!

Buttttt there's just something about the yearly flu vaccine.

Perhaps if you were to elaborate...

I never have,despite being very pro all other vaccines, because for older children the main aim of extending the vaccine programme is to stop them spreading virus to vulnerable younger kids and babies or older adults,who are far more likely to be hospitalised or die from flu. I think we have to be very clear about the reasons we give vaccines, there has become a huge issue with vaccine fatigue and hesitancy amongst people and an increasing proportion of parents are avoiding giving the absolute crucial vaccines eg. MMR and other early childhood jabs . Post covid ,it’s a really concerning situation.

My kids have it every year.

Flu is awful and young children are at higher risk of complications

How rude.

Exactly, thank you :)

My hesitation is around the fact that our tap water truly isn't as clean as we thought a few years ago.

Our food (that's marketed as healthy) is full of inflammatory rubbish and ultra processed.

Certain harmful chemicals are allowed in our beauty products that we slather on every single day.

Crops are allowed to be sprayed with 101 harmful chemicals - this goes into our system every day!

So I think it's fair for me to question this and want to know more, before blindly doing something recommended by the NHS/government. Call it trust issues lol!

Please either give it to them or don't socialise until flu season is over

I mean it is other people's business because children are germ factories and those germs can kill other people

Tap water is cleaner than it's ever been.

No one has ever imagined find us crispy pancakes etc are anything but factory food.

Beauty products used to have things like lead and radium in them.

Likewise food pesticides used to be a free for all.

Definitely room for improvement but the idea things are forever worse is destructive and silly. You can trust authorities to deliver while also calling on them to do more.

Go back 50 years or so and the environment was much more toxic.

I love it when people don't vaccinate because 'that disease doesn't go round much' - if nobody vaccinates and they'd certainly go round more, and some kids would die or be left with lifelong illnesses.

My 3yo nearly died from complications of chickenpox, I wish I'd vaccinated. They get every vaccination going.

I actually think this attitude of 'we're in decline, nobody in power can be trusted, everyone is in it for themselves' is partly the product of russian psyops trying to undermine the west. Genuinely. They want to demoralise by making us dissatisfied with things when we've actually got it pretty good.

This is nonsense.

The symptoms of colds and flu overlap, while the severity of both varies. You might get a mild case of flu; you might get a cold that knocks you down flat. If you're ill, you don't typically get tested for influenza, but are just left to treat the symptoms regardless of what it is. Unless you've been tested, you don't know whether it's a cold or influenza.

My dd cant have it as she has asd and has such severe meltdowns with medical things we are just not doing it as in the past she has temporarily lost her sight after meltdowns and it’s not worth it

I thought that too, for a very long time.

It was only a few years ago when my work started offering it, that I realised you could still get it but have to pay for it (if not as a work perk).

You can get it at a lot of pharmacies and I think it is about £16.

So because there are other things in the world you mistrust or consider unhealthy, you won't make use of a perfectly safe, tried, tested, life saving vaccination, which would protect your own children and other members of society. Make it make sense 🫠

If you’re high risk then wouldn’t it make sense for them to have it to protect you?

As your youngest is 17 they’ll have been offered it at school over the last few years. Not sure they still get offered via sixth form at 17?

None of your rationale has anything to do with the reasons the flu vaccine is recommended by the experts at the NHS.

It does. My point, is experts aren't always to be trusted.

And who should be then? Random uneducated fearmongers on Facebook and Tiktok? "Curiousmummy" my arse. If you were actually curious about things you'd study science and see how these things are checked and validated.

The highest rates of flu infection (in an unvaxxed population) are amongst children. The highest death rates are amongst the elderly, those with certain medical conditions and babies under about 8-12 months.

So the aim of the NHS programme is twin: a) to reduce death rates by vaccinating all those at higher risk who are old enough plus pregnant women to confer some protection on new babies, and
b) to reduce the total number of cases in the community by giving the immunisation to the demographic where most cases would otherwise be found

Full-on flu is a miserable thing to have. I’d definitely want to do all I can to maximise the chances of my DC going through that

Please explain.

You think people train to be experts just to suggest things that are actually wrong, just to fuck things up? You think the NHS pays for flu jabs because they want to make people ill?

It beggars belief. Experts can get things wrong sometimes but that doesn't mean they're not to be trusted.

On the one hand you have peer reviewed science and decades of data, on the other hand you have some self-appointed social media influencer with a bad feeling.

I'm pretty sure most people trust the experts if they have a heart attack, cancer etc.

"Buttttt there's just something about the yearly flu vaccine"

Quite the scientific rigour, there.