A short rant about the flu vaccine.

I’m not getting vaccinated against the swine flu. Really. It’s true, and I’m tired of people asking me and then arguing with me about it. It’s not as though I’m out there arguing for people not to get it, but I’ve made a decision based on my own health history and weighed out that the benefits of getting the vaccine don’t outweigh the risks.

At work we got a notice a couple of days ago letting us know that the flu clinic will be arriving on our doorstep in a couple of weeks and if we wished to participate we could get vaccinated for swine flu, seasonal flu, and pneumococcal all at the same time! For only a low, low price of $72. This, in a system with “socialized” health care – the government pays for the delivery (through clinics) of a product for which we pay full cost to the companies that produce it. You would think if governments really wanted to emphasize the importance of such things as vaccines they would provide them free of charge, but this has less to do with what’s important to us (the citizenry) than what’s important to them (those string-pullers at the top).

Just to be clear, I’m not a conspiracy theorist on this stuff by a long shot – but I do believe in collusion among class forces as a natural outcome of capitalism. Those at the top want to stay there, and it doesn’t matter at who’s expense. Politicians are sold hysteria by pharmas and just to ensure they don’t get caught out they pass it on to the public with the help of the media. It’s not as though doctors are uniformly for vaccination. In Britain, for example a full 50% of doctors don’t support routine vaccination (that is vaccination in healthy/not-at-risk populations).

About twelve years ago I had a flu so bad I thought I was going to die – high fever, delerium, basically unconcious for hours at a time – and granted, it was an awful experience. As awful, if not more than what I hear swine flu can be. It’s true that I don’t want to get sick like that ever again, but there’s a chance the vaccine could make me that sick too (a co-worker here got creeping fascitis from a flu clinic at work a few years ago and ended up hospitalized as a result of the shot, another co-worker got the shot just as she was coming down with the flu and got sicker than anyone else she knew at the time)…. and instead I’m washing my hands obsessively and gargling nightly (a public health nurse told me that gargling can kill H1N1 while it’s still incubating in the throat and before it gets into your system to make you sick). So there. I’ve got better hygeine standards as a result and that’s going to protect me against a whole lot more than the swine flu vaccine,