I haven't had a shot this year. I really haven't thought about it. My old Mama will be 92 in January. She gets a shot every year, and she seldom gets sick. That doesn't really mean much, I guess, because she apparently has some kind of robust immune system. She hasn't lost any hearing, doesn't use glasses even for reading, and still works 20 hours a week at the public library. She takes very little medicine, but she gets that flu shot every year.
I think influenza (what most people call "the flu" ain't) just scares the hell out of the CDC and the medical community in general. Remember when Bird Flu was going to kill all of us? Then it was Swine Flu. So far, non of the dire predictions have come to fruition. The thing is, according to what I read, it is just a matter of time. The last really deadly flu epidemic in the US was the "Hong Kong" flu in 1968. It killed about 70,000 in the US, and about a million people world-wide. I don't know what those numbers would extrapolate to given 2010 population. I think medical scientists know it is coming. Given the anti-government sentiment that is so rampant today, I can see an epidemic causing two or three hundred thousand deaths in the US turning into a socio-political crisis as well as a medical one.
Say there was a vaccination, and it proved ineffective. There would be thousands who believed the government killed people on purpose. Or, say there was no vaccine. The hordes would want to know why the government didn't "do something."
Anyhow, to end this cheery post, I have long predicted that if there is major political/social upheaval in the US in the next few years, it will be caused either by something like a flu epidemic, or by acute food shortages. Have you looked at what the grain market has done over the last year or so?
I can see what's coming for me next.
