LifelongStudent
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I should start this response by saying that the final authority on any medical question should be your own personal doctor. They know are professionals and can diagnose you specifically based on your check up and medical history. But since you are asking this question here, I am guessing the doctor visit might be an expense you are not looking forward to, so we’ll cancel the health care debate for today and just answer the question.
You cannot get the flu from a flu vaccination shot. A vaccine works by injecting you with an already dead or severely weakened virus fragment. The immune system of a healthy human is constantly working, identifying and killing foreign objects in your body. Viruses are so tough to beat because they are sneaky- they usually slip by your defenses at first and start taking over cells and you are already sick by the time your body can track them down. These cells become factories for the virus, spreading it throughout the body. Once your body has identified the virus, it starts building special cells called T-cells which kill the infected cells so they won’t spread the virus anymore (every wonder why your body aches so much when you get the flu?) Once you’ve beaten a particular virus, your body remembers it and won’t let it come in again. This is where vaccines beat the virus to the punch- the presence of even a killed virus is enough to get your immune system to begin producing antibodies to protect you against it.
This works wonders against known diseases such as polio, hepatitis A, and the bubonic plague. The problem with influenza (“the flu”) is that it is extremely unstable and mutates every year, which allows it to slip past most people’s defenses to make them sick, even though they’ve had the flu before. Each yearly flu vaccine contains a dead sample of that year’s mutation, and it will take your body a couple of weeks after the shot to make the proper adjustments, which is why the best time to get the shot is very early in the season, because you can still get sick while your body is building up its defenses. Getting a flu shot isn’t a 100% guarantee, either- but it does greatly reduce your chances of getting a bad case of the flu that year.
You should still be careful about getting the vaccine though, which is why I mentioned your doctor in the first paragraph. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, people who are severely allergic to eggs, have had a severe allergic reaction to a previous influenza vaccine, babies younger than 6 months, and people who are already sick should not get the vaccine. There is also some controversy surrounding the H1N1 (“swine”) flu vaccines, which are different from the seasonal flu vaccines, due to the extremely rare risk of developing Guillain-Barre Syndrome, a condition which causes the body to damage its own nerve cells, which can lead to paralysis, although most people who have contracted this syndrome recover within a few weeks. To decide if either vaccine is the right move for you, your best bet is to ask your doctor.
The other possibility is that you believe that vaccines are not a miracle of modern science that save millions of lives worldwide each year, but are a part of a global plot to infect everybody with disease. If this is the case, there’s not much I can do for you…best to just lock yourself in a bunker and wait for the apocalypse!
Check out all the lectures in this series!
 Posted 5234 day ago
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