Sometimes I think about how absolutely wild it is that people generally don’t understand how vaccines and your immune system works. People be like “I don’t wanna get the flu shot cause one time a friend of a friend got the flu shot and then the next day the were so sick with the flu and it was the worst one they’d ever got” or like “ i got the flu shot and then i got the sniffles and my arm hurt.” Bud of course your arm hurt a bit, you got stabbed with a needle and also those symptoms are how you know your immune system is working. When you get vaccinated, your body is introduced to the virus and so your body builds antibodies to the virus so that it can fight the virus off next time it sees it. The fever and arm pain and fatigue is your body’s natural immune response to seeing and virus and boosting a response, they’re not necessarily part of the virus itself. You can’t get the flu from the dead flu vaccine! If you ‘got’ the flu from the vaccine, you almost definitely had the flu prior to or while getting the vaccine and your immune response is reacting to both. It can take up to 2 weeks to build immunity to the flu and you need to get the shot every year as the immunity provided is typically only for one year.
