41 percent of adults don't plan to get flu shot despite last year's deadly season

Hawkeye10 said:

Also it has been well documented that our flu shots are poorly done, they often dont work very well and could work a lot better if we upgraded our practices. For example there is no reason we should be guessing a year out what strains will be most active next year, we should develop methods of manufacture that dont take so long, we should be able to make vaccines that are better suited for current conditions.

What is missing is the will to do so.

Every year we get the hard sell "Go get your flu shot, it is very important!", yet clearly it is not important enough to motivate the experts and our governments to do a better job of producing the said flu shot.

This lowers morale and discounts the experts and our governments claims.

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41 percent of adults don't plan to get flu shot despite last year's deadly season

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Hawkeye10 said:

Last year "Go get your flu shot, it is very important!" turned out to be wrong. And almost no one will admit it, and almost no one is out talking about how we need to make our flu shots better. There is a lack of honesty and a lack of accountability and a lack of desire to do better.

The little people are not generally so dim that they cant figure out what is going on.

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brothern said:

Oh, no, there's is absolutely a desire to create a vaccine like this. There's tens of millions of dollars being pumped into the pipeline to create it. However we lack the technology to manufacturer such a shot.

To explain a bit: the flu virus looks conceptually like a hairy soccer ball. The hairs are representative of the viruses' antigens, which are surface proteins (on the cell membrane) that typically help the virus to dock on a host cell, fuse and inject the viral DNA/RNA into that host cell.

Our body fights off the virus by producing antibodies that continually circulate through the blood stream and have the ability to bind (block) to those viral antigens. However those antibody configurations are produced randomly via cellular mutations. Our vaccines work, because they (for example) contain destroyed virus cell parts that still contain the pieces of antigens ... which allows the human immune system to randomly stumble upon the right antibody configuration, but without the risk of live virus cells being in the bloodstream.

The issue is that the flu's antigens change so frequently and drastically, our ability to produce vaccines as well as the body's ability to recognize last year's crop of flu antigens is completely wasted. We've not come up with a life-long vaccine, because we first need to identify an antigen on the flu's cell membrane that does not change year to year.

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brothern said:

Oh, no, there's is absolutely a desire to create a vaccine like this. There's tens of millions of dollars being pumped into the pipeline to create it. However we lack the technology to manufacturer such a shot.

To explain a bit: the flu virus looks conceptually like a hairy soccer ball. The hairs are representative of the viruses' antigens, which are surface proteins (on the cell membrane) that typically help the virus to dock on a host cell, fuse and inject the viral DNA/RNA into that host cell.

Our body fights off the virus by producing antibodies that have the ability to bind (block) to those viral antigens. However those antibody configurations are produced randomly via cellular mutations. Our vaccines work, because they (for example) contain destroyed virus cell parts that still contain the pieces of antigens ... which allows the human immune system to randomly stumble upon the right antibody configuration, but without the risk of live virus cells being in the bloodstream.

The issue is that the flu's antigens change so frequently and drastically, our ability to produce vaccines as well as the body's ability to recognize last year's crop of flu antigens is completely wasted. We've not come up with a life-long vaccine, because we first need to identify an antigen on the flu's cell membrane that does not change year to year.

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brothern said:

This is also why HIV has not been solved. Each type of virus binds to different types of host cells. The HIV virus happens to target the T-helper cells in our bodies that direct

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mike2810 said:

How would you predict which strain of flu will be main issue in the next flu season? Yep, sometimes the doctors/scientist miss what strain became the problem. Hopefully the scientist will develop a quicker way to manufacture a vaccine to produce the product in a more timely manner.

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Kal'Stang said:

Actually, I got it before flu season started around here at her yearly checkup. The flu season around here is usually around October. I got my daughter the flu shot in the beginning of August right when school started.

And not all flu shots are inactive. Boston Childrens Hopital ~ Live virus vaccine vs. killed virus vaccine: What's the difference? I didn't even know that they gave out live flu shots until this year.

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