My experience seems very similar to what Gunnar is saying:
1. Flu vaccination very rarely leads to any unpleasant consequences.
2. Flu vaccination does not guarantee that you will not get flu, but it can give you degrees of risk reduction that vary from moderate to quite large, depending on the success level of the vaccine designers in targeting the dominant flu strain for that year.
So what's not to like?
Gunnar wrote: ↑Mon Oct 26, 2020 6:56 am
I do catch the common cold almost every year, with varying degrees of severity and duration. It is certainly not impossible that at least some some of those colds, particularly the more severe ones, were relatively mild, but undiagnosed cases of the flu.
I think that the pharmaceutical industry does its best to persuade us that we have a 'touch of flu' when all we have is a heavy cold. They do that because thinking that way makes us more likely to treat ourselves as 'sick' and thus to purchase 'remedies' (which in fact have only a palliative action) than we would have been if we had only thought of ourselves as having a cold.
But from my own experience and from what I have read, the symptoms of the two diseases are markedly different, as is their duration and seriousness. Colds in themselves never give me a fever, headaches, cold shivers and joint pains, and they don't keep me in bed for a week or more. That's what my two or three flu infections in a lifetime definitely did do. There is no 'grey area' of confusion between my colds and my flu.
By the way - I have not had a cold since I began to live under the impact of anti-COVID personal hygiene and social distancing. A community nurse recently confirmed that this was a general observation amongst her patients, and what is more there had been a marked reduction in the incidence of other contagious diseases, such as gastro-enteric virus infections.