Miss Beatrice, the church organist, was in her eighties and had never been
married. She was admired for sweetness and kindness to all.
One afternoon the pastor came to call on her and she showed him into her
quaint sitting room. She invited him to have a seat while she prepared
tea.
As he sat facing her old pump organ, the young minister noticed a
cut-glass bowl sitting on top of it. The bowl was filled with water. In the water
floated, of all things, a condom!
When she returned with tea and scones, they began to chat. The pastor
tried
to stifle his curiosity about the bowl of water and its strange floater,
but soon it got the better of him and he could no longer resist. "Miss
Beatrice", he said, "I wonder if you would tell me about this?" pointing
to the bowl.
"Oh, yes" she replied, "isn't it wonderful? I was walking through the park
a few months ago and I found this little package on the ground. The
directions said to place it on the organ, keep it wet and that it would
prevent the spread of disease. Do you know I haven't had the flu all
winter!"

hyuk-hyuk

That's not how you spell "weiner".

Beepster
That's not how you spell "weiner".

 
That isn't either.

I get no regard   No regard at all

bayoubill
I get no regard   No regard at all

Relevant?

Definitely prevent the flu if possible. The missed target mix for this year may still offer some collateral benefit if you do get slobbered on by an infected humanoid in the Walmart checkout line.
 
How they end up with a flu shot is a crystal ball thing trying to anticipate what variants will be spreading across the planet in the next year.
They usually do 3 guesses,. Sometimes right but often not, like this season, and the plague descends. Think when I retired, they were doing a quadravalent mix to get another possibility and a high potency immune kicker for old decrepit farts over 65.
 
Vaccinations are a mix of risk versus benefit. The dead fragments of the real bug and the newer designer plastic molecules are safer, but further away from providing adequate protection.
 
Best thing is to actually get the real disease. If you survive, you are good for another 20 years at least being immune to the specific strain.
 
Polio a more genetic narrow target so far. Get polio and paralyzed, the bad news. Good news is you will never get polio again.
 
Common cold and things like norovirus. These things are fluid and adaptive. You get a cold, get better and are immune to that cold virus for life. Problem is with more than 10,000 strains we know of so far, you can turn around and get a new cold at exposure. Good news is that there are only 9,999 exposures left to gain full immunity to the common cold unless they mutate and you got several thousand more to deal with.
 
Vaccination has got a bad rap. You can still get allergic reactions from the eggs and mercury in the injection, but the benefit is always higher than the risk on a population wide basis.
 
Except for, and you probably don't know this...
 
Live attenuated polio vaccine. Risk is greater than the benefit for the individual.
Live virus is knocked silly and dormant with things like formaldehyde and heat. This retains the raw native presentation of the real disease. Max immune response and you are protected almost as much as getting the disease.
 
Problem is that the live vaccine can do what they call "revert to the wild type". Meaning the virus shakes off the formaldehyde hangover and you are devastating infected. Risk of getting polio in the community is zero on this side of the pond. Risk of death and harm from the attenuated virus is higher. Here is where we make the call to sacrifice one for the many.
 
After receiving the attenuated polio virus, the components are shed in human feces.
 
We realize that the toilet system is such that everything is recycled into the drinking water. Your neighbor a block down flushes her toilet and you are eating her crap soon after.
 
We have inspiringly been able to process  a "herd immunity" effect. Up to 90 percent of humans are already vaccinated against polio by drinking out of the toilets of their neighbors even if they never got a shot. Really cool approach if not for a rare few that die being sacrificed for the greater good. Your local care provider will not be overly inspired to share this tidbit with you.
 
Bon appetite, and you can always boil your tap water.
 
John
 
 

LOL, that is a good one. 

Thanks Rita,
 
Should add that there are several live virus injections and things you can snort under the benevolent care of your doc. Better living through chemistry. A specific flu cocktail, mumps stuff, rubella, chicken pox, small pox, typhoid, polio, some weird jungle swamp diseases, etc. Tuberculosis live bugs to be injected via catheter into the bladder of cancer patients. Love that one, seriously brilliant and seems to have some benefit slowing the progression of generic bladder cancers. Always had to add extra levels of protection to safeguard the techs and nurses from slowing cancer of the patient, but showing up to work with active TB a couple months later. Once you broke open the vial and inhaled any of the cloud, you were dead meat.
 
There is a myth that you can get the disease from shots other than the attenuated bug. This is not possible and the claim is false. You might get sicker than crap reacting to the shot, but can't get the disease unless you have been administered the live attenuated mix.
 
Live stuff offers a great benefit after receiving it, and have to emphasize the rarity of getting the actual disease from a shot. Probably won't happen. Chances of winning the lottery thing. The bug is a real representation to the immune complex so accurate immunity is established quite effectively in a couple weeks. What has just been injected into your body is knocked senseless but still continues to stagger around and grow in your body at a slower rate trying to take you down if it could just wake up and do its thing. Hope and odds is that it can't. Immune system gets a longer time to process it and thus a higher level of immunity. Except in the rare cases where the bug bounces back full force in less than the couple weeks it takes us to figure out we got to be immune to something. Bummer if that happens.
 
John