5 common flu vaccine excuses

whenever I talk about flu vaccine with people I often hear the same questions and comments kind of coming up over and over again and so I put kind of a short list together of really common things that people say and I wanted to just kind of discuss them one by one so let's say this person over here the top left this person she says to me well you know what I don't really see the point of getting the vaccine because I never get sick you know she says you know many years have gone by and her immune system has just been really healthy and she just never seems to get sick so she just doesn't see the point of getting the vaccine and in response to this what I usually kind of draw an analogy to is seatbelts and I'll say well you know many people have never been in a serious car accident but we know from research that seatbelts are a really good idea and they keep you safe and they reduce the risk of getting you know horrible injury and so just as I would recommend you wear the seat belt or maybe wear a helmet if you're doing something dangerous similarly I would recommend the flu vaccine and usually when they explain it this way people get it and they say okay well you know even though I've never gotten in a major car accident I do wear my seat belt so just like that even though I've never gotten sick I'm gonna go ahead and get my flu vaccine now in the bottom left this gentleman is saying a little bit of the opposite he says well you know I've gotten the flu vaccine dr. Desai but I still got sick you know I've I did it last year maybe the year before and I still got sick afterwards so what was the point right why did I even do it and so now I don't want to do it anymore and I can understand his logic you know that makes you know a degree of sense and what I usually tell folks that say this is I kind of explained the idea of a copycat virus that maybe when they got sick with what they thought was the flu or the flu virus maybe it was one of these other viruses remember their viruses such as RSV or Rhino virus that can somebody's make you feel like you have the flu so maybe he had one of those viruses instead another explanation could be maybe he got sick right after he got the vaccine and remember the vaccine needs a couple of weeks there's a two-week delay or so before you get the full protection from the vaccine so maybe he was in that two week time span right after he got the vaccination and maybe he got sick then and lastly we remember the flu vaccine has three strains in it so maybe he had a different strain maybe it was just one of the other flu virus strains that was out there that year so who knows exactly why he got sick that year that he says he got sick but that doesn't change the fact that the flu vaccine is still gonna reduce his chances of getting sick in the future now one thing I'm gonna stick with this gentleman here in the bottom left he might say well a different strain what the heck if that's the case then what's the point you know I often hear that he says what's the point if you could have just you know flu illness from some other strain and when people talk about this yeah you know I have to remind them that it's not perfect right so it's not an exact science and what you have to remember is that it goes back to the seatbelt issue you know it does reduce your chances of getting sick from the flu but it's not going to reduce it down to zero I mean nothing in life is gonna reduce your chances to zero and there's still a possibility that you could get sick and so our best offer is that you can reduce the chance of getting sick let's move on to this gentleman in the middle and so he says to me well you know what I think that the flu vaccine made me sick so this is a little different right he's saying that the flu vaccine itself made him sick and this is something a lot of people think they think well you know maybe the maybe I was fine and maybe it was only after getting the flu vaccine that I got sick and this can be a very frustrating thing to feel I mean that's horrible that you're feeling fine and then a vaccine came along and made you feel awful but a couple of facts have to come to mind so one fact for example is that we know that the flu vaccine cannot give you flu so we know flu vaccine does not cause flu that's a fact and the reason I can say that with with certainty is that one of the two vaccines is actually dead remember there's the TIV and then there's the LA IV the TIV is a dead vaccine meaning the virus inside of it is dead and the LA IV that's the other option this one is alive but it's very weak and so usually with this one you might get a runny nose at best and so if he says you know I think that I got sick from the flu vaccine I would say well you know I don't think that's that's possible from this one right if you got the injected version then that's not possible at all and if you got the live version then you may have gotten some symptoms but we wouldn't call that the flu and I would also say that if if that weak vaccine made you sick can you only imagine how you would have felt if you had the wild virus the one that circulates in work trying to protect you from what's much more likely for this gentleman is that he probably got sick from maybe this copycat virus one of the other viruses that are circulating probably around the time that he had the flu vaccine so he mistakenly thought that the vaccine made him sick when it was probably just another virus or maybe he got sick when he was still within two weeks of getting the vaccine because again we said before that it takes a couple weeks to to really get up and running so in the top right now we have this guy and he says to me well you know what I hate pain and this this is probably my excuse this is the one I used to use a lot I hate pain and I hate getting vaccines because usually that means a lot of pain so for folks like this and again this was my own mindset I say okay well if pain is what you're trying to avoid think let the fact that flu getting sick with the flu is much much worse than getting a sore arm and that's the most common side effect people talk about with that TIV vaccine the dead vaccine and also if you get the other vaccine the live vaccine then I would say well flu is still a lot worse than getting a runny nose and that's the most common side effect that people talk about with the live vaccine so when you think about the common side effects flu is much much worse than the side effects you'd get with the vaccines so we come down to this lady in the bottom right she says to me well you know what dr. Desai I think you're a nice person but I really don't trust vaccines I don't think that they're safe and I don't trust what's inside of them I think that there is something dangerous about them and specifically I don't like she might even say thimerosal hi Marysol is something that people talk a lot about and it's found inside of some of the flu vaccines and so that's what she's referring to so in response it's tough right it's tough to talk about issues if you're not trusted and so the first and easy thing to kind of say is well you know if you really just don't trust them aerosol some of the flu vaccines the single dose kind of vials of flu vaccines they don't even have thimerosal so single dose vials don't have thimerosal so that's kind of an easy solution right if that's her biggest issue or concern then you can just say well you know fair enough that's kind of an easy fix and sometimes that works sometimes that's good enough and people say oh okay well if they don't have it then you know I'll go ahead and get the single dose flu vaccine but for others that simply just don't trust vaccines in general because they've heard about fly marisol or they've heard about autism things like that you know there I think it's really helpful to just discuss where these things come from where did this whole idea of thimerosal or autism where was it born and the truth is that there's kind of a complicated history to that and there's a huge thimerosal myth that has been born and people disgust on the Internet and so I'll talk about the thimerosal myth and the facts behind it because that's the only way to kind of garner a little bit of trust with folks is to actually discuss the facts and actually separately from this video we have a sign marisol video that you can watch and understand as well