New Evidence Surfaces of Flu Vaccine’s Ineffectiveness. How to Protect Yourself and Your Family Sensibly.

A month ago, while eating lunch with some friends, the table next to us comprised of two elderly women were having a conversation about the flu and the fact that it was all over the news that the flu was everywhere and that as an older person, their lives were in jeopardy. One of the women confessed that she never takes the flu shot but because it was on the nightly news that people were dying from it (and of course, there was plenty of footage of overflowing emergency rooms), she decided to have the shot, even though we were heading out of flu season.

Well, it is all over today’s papers; the flu vaccine was 9 percent effective for seniors over 65, the main group being scared into doing this yearly ritual. Rather than echoing what is being said in every newspaper, we need to think about better and more proven solutions. Sure, scare campaigns amplified by the media helped Walgreen’s sell out of their stock, but is the flu shot good public policy or a good way to spend 7 billion dollars that can be diverted elsewhere for better effect. I am sure it is great for the big pharma companies that manufacture the serum that guarantees nothing other than it is pharmaceutical grade, but is there a better way to avoid the flu, and the many strains that are currently in the public areas we frequent?

One way to start improving your immune response. You can begin by avoiding hand sanitizers unless you are handling food. Read more about this here. We are constantly training our immune systems and when we have children, we super train our systems to fight against the current strains of everything since our children infect us. As many of you have experienced, the colds go around the family and the parents feel worse than the children do until our bodies learn to how to develop the immune response to it. Do it enough times and you have fewer colds.

Keeping this in mind, inoculation does not have to occur artificially in a doctors office or at Walgreen’s. Go to a rock concert and stand in those crowds and guess what, you’ve been inoculated against whatever is currently making people ill.

The next trick is to understand what your body feels like when it is fighting a cold. Usually, we feel malaise, maybe achy, and maybe sneeze a few times. If you feel this, get on it by helping your body out with our cold survival kit (read more). By taking these recommendations, you can avoid ever falling into the flu shot trap by being a cold virus vigilante, and never giving it a chance to have it take hold for you and your family.

Perhaps, in the future, the government will use the money for the seasonal flu shot and perhaps, put it elsewhere, so it can be more helpful for the average American. Just between us, until the flu shot shows effectiveness and safety vs. 9% effectiveness and risk, a better public policy is for all of us to share this information with others so they can be healthier and develop our immune systems to fight the flu and other ills more effectively, and then, perhaps, maybe the government will reallocate that money’s to perhaps our crumbling infrastructure, a place it can certainly be more useful as more cars hit the road.

What do you think? As always, I value your opinions.