Flu is real bad this year.
Not to late to get the vaccine for yourself and/or kids peeps
Lot of deaths in healthy people, not just oldies
Put on your clinical hat: in your experience is the flu shot effective to what is going around? I got the flu shot (I had to) but I wonder about it's effectiveness, especially this year.
Our hospital is in overflow btw.
I'll put my scientist hat on.
spoiler (click to show/hide)
Which is superior
.
It's a bit of a trick question. Flu vaccines are some of the least efficient around, and can range from anything like 30% to 70+. This year is particularly bad. So it's obviously rubbish compared to, say, yellow fever, which is like 95+ IIRC.
This is due to the fact that vaccinologists have to "predict" which strain will spread out each year, and design the vaccine accordingly. With not a lot of time to do so. And there's a lot of them. This is why you hear about H5N1, H1N1 and so on.
But even if the efficiency is low, it's still worth it. The point with flu vaccines isn't to make sure you as an individual will most likely be safe from a really nasty infection (like yellow fever), but to try and limit the impact on populations as a whole, since the flu spreads so easily and commonly. Even protecting just 30% of people will save a lot of lives, but also significantly slow down the spread of the virus. This is what constitutes "herd immunity", if you've heard the term before.
