“Yeah, but I still wouldn’t get a flu shot” she almost needlessly exclaimed at the conclusion of a conversation a friend and I were having concerning her ability to receive healthcare.

“WHAT?!? Why?? You’re joking right?” –“No, I’m dead serious I just hate shots” she said matter-of-factly.

“You can’t be serious; you’re saying that if you took the initiative to get your healthcare in order, you wouldn’t get a flu shot just because you don’t like the split-second prick in your arm?” I asked incredulously “Well, that, AND every time I’ve gotten one in the past, I’ve gotten really sick afterwards”

Her First Valid Point. Flu shots have been known to catalyze an immune response in the body that is similar to a bad cold. However, nothing to the extent of contracting the live version of the flu shot that was administered. People have known this for a while though, and the reason is because your body will take energy from other healthy systems, leaving them depleted, and use this cellular energy in the bolstering of the immune system.

Everyone has a system that goes down first when you get sick. You may not have realized it before, but it’s somewhat unique to you, and is more or less consistent. Perhaps you had asthma as a kid like myself, and when you’re ill (albeit depending on the type of sickness you contract) you are more likely to experience exaggerated coughing symptoms. Someone else might experience more congestion in his or her nose and throat, or perhaps headaches, or even indigestion. For some people, a runny nose and general fatigue are signs that their body is under attack; but with enough energy to live their daily life.

What about when you wake up with truly debilitating symptoms—such as a throbbing throat, or vomiting, or muscle aches, along with a congested cough—you are at that point fighting a losing battle with a virus; one where your immune system is taxing numerous vital systems in your body of the necessary energy they need to operate correctly. That because of how viruses work. As opposed to getting an infection from cutting your arm open—where you’re dealing with the tiny, rapidly-reproducing cells known as bacteria (that often weaken you with the toxic byproducts of their division)— when you get a cold or the dreaded annual flu, you have been invaded by a virus: a “germ” that is on a much smaller scale than bacteria, and their physical structure make them far more efficient at their sinister plot: to hijack the control center off all of your cells.

Its true. Viruses are so tiny, that when you come in contact with one, it slips right into your cells and head for the nucleus: the area that contains the DNA, or rather the instructions for operating the rest of the cell. It inserts a code that influences the DNA to command all of its organelles to make the blueprint for itself: more of the virus. It has no termination in its plans, it is a build-and-kill command, and the cell, like a zombie, will continue to produce the virus until it explodes from not being able to hold anymore within its membrane, and all the identical offspring erupt like a cloud of dandelion seeds in search of a new cell to victimize in the same way. Thus, one cell is completely incapacitated; being dead, it obviously cant do the job it was designated to do within whatever tissue it was associated, but one dead cell is no big deal for our health at large, other healthy once in its vicinity can pull its weight. The problem is viruses do this fast, and quickly destroy enough cells in one tissue to cause it to struggle to do its job. Viruses don’t care if their host survives or dies, they’re not complex enough. they have no benefit in keeping their host cells alive because it limits their ability to produce the max number of offspring, so they WILL keep doing so until from the human perspective, we lose the operation of a vital system, and die.

When you are given a flu shot, the viral ingredients in the vaccine alert the immune system to create antibodies. These include the tiny chemical “cues” that blood cells create to identify different pathogens and remember their weaknesses, and the white blood cells themselves that “eat” foreign invaders. In order to create antibodies though, your body needs to take that energy from other systems allocate nutrients to your bone marrow so as to perform the cell division needed to make more antibodies. Flu shots contained the killed version of flu, which is different than the live version because it’s basically been blended. Its structure is broken up so it can’t do its usual job, but as mentioned, the “ingredients” are still red flags to the immune system so they enough soldiers (or WBC) to fight it, but then they don’t have to fight it, because it’s dead. So the soldiers wait around. If you come in contact with the live version, the white blood cells are queued for battle and vastly increase the speed at which you contain and eliminate the invasion. Thus: within 1-4 days after administration, vaccines stimulate the natural disease-fighting system of the body to be quantitatively prepared to fight potential battle of a forecasted virus. Put simply: vaccines induce immunity.

People aren’t use to seeing the devastating affects of these (until-recently) extinct diseases first hand, so certain individuals have become complacent; and inclined to reason that in the half-century absence of these disease, some paradigm change in their virulence occurred that simultaneously granted these people the intellectual authority to neglect the science that brought about the original extermination of nearly a dozen life-threatening pathogens. Either that, or these individuals are savvy to the existence of the controversial Dr. Oz, and his claim that flu shots contain a preservative derived from mercury, which was true. For certain vaccines in the past, this was true, but the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella vaccine does not and this is a vital defense for school aged children. Respected Scientist Jenny McCarthy (just kidding she was a Playboy model) used her notoriety to claim that flu shots cause autism. This was proven completely false. There is no correlation, multiple studies have been performed since her unforgivable and unfounded slander of science to prove her irrefutably wrong, and the verdict is in: don’t believe everything you read on the internet. Trust the educated care givers that dedicate their life to finding the most cost-effective health investments with proven strategies that make them accessible to the greatest number of individuals.

Seriously, the verdict is in. Australia recently passed the “No Jab, No Pay” immunization policy that goes into effect January 2016 which prevents parents from receiving healthcare benefits if they don’t immunize their children, which amount to thousands of dollars of subsidized healthcare for other aspects of their child’s treatment throughout the year. Australia doesn’t mess around. I will defend our country’s freedom of speech to the death, literally. But it seems as of late, our trusting of WHO is invoking their right to share input seems to be misguided.

This past January, the CDC announced an outbreak of over 100 measles occurred across 14 states, and President Obama conveniently proposed a $50 million cut to the Federal Government’s “317 Immunization Program” which funds vaccines to uninsured families. Encouragingly though, a coefficient of enlightened school systems are refusing matriculation to students who are not immunized in order to protect their immunized children. Unfortunately, this has already resulted in the decision of some parents to home school their children to avoid vaccination, which brings up a whole new suite of issues that affect the family and child socially, financially, and—namely—in virulent susceptibility. In my opinion, there is a flagrant attack on public health in the name of elected ignorance. Sadly, the issue may be already out of our control. Because it has been decades since the presence of something like polio, you can ask 10 people if they know someone who lost the function of a lime due to atrophy from polio and 10 of them will tell you no. Seeing a person affected by that disease first hand would simply remind a person of the seriousness of being immune. With the freedom to abstain from vaccination, we may be forced to endure a number of pandemic outbreaks that sicken and even kill thousands of people before the appropriate media attention implores the national population to take the advised precautions in order to keep said pandemics, in the history books.