I don’t know if Target Pharmacy was selling Flublok itself or something similar. I went googling and turned up a press release from last September (I got the shot in October). Here’s the quote -
*
“And for those with allergies, babies on the way, or plain old needle-phobia? Target has just debuted a new egg-free flu shot, ideal for expectant guests and those with certain allergies, and we’ve got a nasal mist for those who dread shots, along with the usual flu season treatments.”*
So last fall, Target Pharmacy was selling some kind of egg-free shot. There were advertisements in their stores, too, although, as I said, I just opted for the basic shot.
I have no idea if this will help Broomstick; I just thought she might want to ask about it.
ETA: Speaking of shots, my niece, who had been vaccinated, still caught Whooping Cough this year, and passed it to her Mom and me. I’m on my third round of antibiotics and still coughing so hard that I get laryngospasm sometimes. The Whooping Cough vaccine is given in a 3-part vaccine with diptheria & tetanus. I was given a new dose of that vaccine when I went in for my antibiotics and was told it would be good for five years. I thoroughly encourage everyone to talk to your doctors about getting your vaccines up to date.
Unfortunately, you aren’t the first to do that nor are you likely to be the last. I understand why you posted what you did - a lot of people who could have the flu shot don’t because they don’t want a sore arm or needles or they don’t think they’re around anyone vulnerable. It becomes automatic to spout the usual paragraph or two.
Doesn’t mean I’m less annoyed, I just understand why it happens.
That’s the million dollar question. I eat eggs and chicken with no problem, but blood tests for IgE show indicate an egg allergy. MY guess, as a lay person, is that somehow my body tolerates eating poultry but gets hysterical when injected with poultry proteins. Isn’t the immune system fun?
The other thing is that the shot I reacted to was the infamous “swine flu” shot of 1976, which was notorious for bad side effects. It is entirely possible that I reacted badly to something else in the shot but it’s a little hard to determine at this point. Since medical personnel dread allergic shock almost as much as I do for the most part no one has been willing to poke that problem too much.
My tendency towards allergic reactions of all sort has occasionally complicated my medical care. There was the time I needed surgery and the doc didn’t want to use general anesthesia, for example (turned out the local worked just fine, didn’t feel any pain during the surgery. During the recovery was another story…)
Thank you!
Those of us who have no choice but to depend on herd immunity are grateful to those who keep up with the herd.
I’ll have to ask again. I ask my doc every year, but he’s hesitant - not that I entirely blame him, he’s an overworked GP with a patient load heavily skewed towards the elderly, disabled, and poor and I doubt he likes anaphylaxis, either. Probably doesn’t have a lot of time to do research on alternative flu shots.
I’m also getting a lot of pushback from my insurance company, which doesn’t want to pay for an alternative to the usual vaccine because my shot allergy isn’t “documented”. Well, shit, it happened forty years ago in an era of paper records when I was a minor, no one kept a copy of the documentation and I don’t even remember where I was taken. Mom remembered… but she’s been dead for awhile so that’s no help.
This year, I could pay out of pocket if I have to, I haven’t been in that situation for nearly 10 years.
Nope, not an anti-vaxxer - I keep up with all the vaccines that don’t try to kill me, which is how I escaped whooping cough when it ran through the work force at my store last year. I figure the sore arm the next day is just my immune system doing its job and learning who the Bad Guys are.
For some odd reason my spouse tends to hover over me and watch me like a hawk for hours after I get a shot, though… (he’s a sweetie and he cares about me. He’s also seen me nearly die from eating the wrong thing by accident.)
Honestly, since I also have mild asthma AND I’ve had the real flu at least twice in my life I would really, really like a flu shot that’s safe for me to take. Right now, I rely on a lot of hand washing and family that doesn’t hesitate to take me to medical care when I have problems. And folks like j666 who make an effort to not spread disease.
Fortunately, I’ve never entirely hit bottom with that. Then again, I don’t wait for it to go away. The sooner you get on the reaction the better off you are.
Oh, I got a second opinion from an ENT after my GP said to have them removed, and he concurred. The constantly stopped up ears were horrible. I cold drive through high hills and end up with ears that were stopped up for several hours. And the stopped up ears gave me headaches. I get way fewer migraines since I had them out, and just generally feel better. It was a very painful surgery, because there are so many nerve endings your throat, but I’d do it again in a heartbeat.
Don’t walk across any bridges, because they’re made of paper, y’know.
I got whooping cough after being vaccinated. My mother thought I got it from the vaccine (my mother was born in 1940, though, and nother could make her an anti-vaxxer-- a mild whooping cough was better than “real” whooping cough, which she had seen), and I told that story for a long time, but now that I know more about vaccines, I think what probably happened is that I was exposed to whooping cough in the doctor’s office when I was taken to be vaccinated, and the vaccine saved me from having a full-blown case. It didn’t stop me from getting it, either because of the proximity of the exposure, or because the vaccine just didn’t confer 100% immunity.
I was sick for only 3 days or so, and treated at home, but I remember how irresistible that cough was. When one came along, there was no way to suppress it-- the need to cough was so overwhelming. I think it was like the horrible feeling when people are jonesing, or trying to suppress tics. You just have to. And once you start, you can’t stop. My mother would slap me on my back, and then tell me to hold my breath for a second to break the cycle. It was so hard to do, but it worked.
I can’t even imagine having real whooping cough. It must just be hell.
You tell me, I haven’t looked into it. I bet they’re not free, and I’d have to walk to a clinic every year, exposing myself to a waiting room full of people with many contagious conditions, some more dangerous than flu, and then wait in line ,and maybe there are side effects. Aside from my being a medical minimalist, and I refuse to unnecessarily feed the voracious and out-of-control 4-trillion-dollar American health care racket.
I travel to the third world every year, exposed to things much more dangerous than flu as well as other strains of flu. I never get sick, presumably I have developed a high resistance to those kinds of things, which comes from exposure. I haven’t had a cold in more than ten years. I’m not going to cower in terror every time I glance at a scare monger cover on a supermarket tabloid, nor a message board posting about a single anecdotal instance of one person getting seriously ill. I treasure and retain my lifestyle choices, and I make them of my own accord.
WallGreens charges $32. Takes about ten minutes. Local health department will probably do it for free. But you’re not actually worried about the cost or the time are you? You just think only other people get sick.
(I routinely travel to the third world, as well. But thinking, ‘Oh I’ve been healthy, clearly I’m immune!’, is kinda highly goofy, in my opinion. I’ve had so many travel shots I have a lifetime immunity to Hep A, but that’s not the flu! The flu is a different animal entirely. I have remained healthy through all of my travels …by listening to my Dr and taking the recommended precautions.)
You should consider potential benefit as well as potential risk.
You should consider the risk and benefit to your community as well as to yourself.
Taking reasonable precautions is not living in fear.
Flu vaccines often are free; many employers pay to reduce absenteeism.
Flu vaccines are widely available, including at work or local pharmacies, where your exposure is no greater than at other times.
Flu is one of the most dangerous easily contracted contagious disease.
This post includes at least two deaths and two illnesses; furthermore, detailed anecdotes can be as useful in decision making as detailed statistics.
Some flu strains target the healthy more than the more typically vulnerable populations; that’s why the 1918-1919 epidemic was so disastrous.
Getting a flu shot is roughly on par with washing your hands regularly for most people; simple, easy, and providing of protection for both the individual and the community.
So there is ‘drift’ (evolution) of influenza viruses. Receiving annual flu shots allows people to ‘keep up’ with the drift. Since strains of the virus can be dominant for decades, the only protection against a new strain comes from vaccines developed for it.
Worth mentioning for the near-inevitable post re “I don’t have to worry about flu because I have a really powerful immune system”.
Both during the 1918-19 pandemic and to some extent when H1N1 flu hit, young healthy people suffered when their strong immune systems went haywire (“cytokine storm”).
I have gotten a flu shot every year, even before it was mandated by the hospitals I work at. I am looking forward to a universal flu vaccine that targets stable regions on the viral genome and can’t be evaded by viral antigen drift/shift. It should still be years before we get one. Meantime, researchers have probably already picked the flu strain(s) they think will be dominant during the next influenza season, and vaccine manufacturers are starting to rev up the long process of growing the viruses and developing the appropriate vaccine. Let’s hope they chose wisely.
*I am pretty well recovered from a bad cold (my first in a long while) that caused marked fatigue and cough for over two weeks. Thankfully, no flu.
j666, you have made a reasoned argument, quite unlike the OP who shouted at me like my mother to do something because she heard a scary anecdote. If you tell me that a person was actually and verifiably killed by an assailant hiding under her bed, that is not by itself a good reason for everyone to look under their bed every night, no matter how small the cost of getting down on your knees with a flashlight and “look under your damn bed”, supported with a single anecdotal horror story.
As for benefit to community, I think it is debatable whether the public health expenditure on flu shots (they are not “free”) has a commensurate impact on the incidence of the disease. In some years, the shots have been found to be of negligible value, having no effect on the prevailing strain of the flu. The mere fact that we have not had a repetition of 1918 is not by itself proof of the efficacy of the shots, and even with shots, such an epidemic remains a risk.
If. as you say, anecdotes are as useful as detailed statistics, nobody would quit smoking, because it is easy to find people who smoked all their lives and lived to be 90. There are plenty of anecdotes about people who drive drunk and never crash. They have anecdotes to support their contention, selected to fit their prior frame of mind.
Yes, I got a shot for shingles, because I am a high-risk demographic. Yes, I got my polio booster, because I travel to countries where it is still prevalent. Yes, I keep up with my tetanus shots. But no, I do not wash my hands habitually, I drink only tapwater everywhere in the world, I eat discarded food, even from dumpsters. I’m a reasonably intelligence adult with access to information, and I do not need to be commanded by my mother shouting at me, damn it.
new eggless flu vaccine, hmm, I remember hearing a few years ago that one was being developed or tested or some such and then somehow it fell off my radar. Gonna look into that one and see if I can get my work place to get me a dose next year (I lose a day of work and cost a lot more to be vaccinated by my employer but they do it anyway and happily so)
My sister died from H1N1 flu in February of 2014. She left behind twin daughters who were six years old. She didn’t get her shot. I can’t begin to describe how horrendous the whole thing was.
I think at my next check-up, I’ll ask about a booster shot.
I wouldn’t bet my life on it, but I would ask a doctor. If your doctor said, no, you’re better off not doing so, then that’s what you should do. Obviously, though, your case is the reason why people who AREN’T allergic need to get their shots. Because the less people who get it, the less we can rely on “herd immunity”. Which is why anti-vaxxers piss me off so much. (Well, one of them that is)
Until you catch the flu and pass it on to someone else. You’re not just making your own “lifestyle choice”. You’re also making it for everyone else.
Jesus – please get well soon. Whooping cough is nasty.
*"Influenza vaccines have a very modest effect in reducing influenza symptoms and working days lost in the general population, including pregnant women. No evidence of association between influenza vaccination and serious adverse events was found in the comparative studies considered in the review. This review includes 90 studies, 24 of which (26.7%) were funded totally or partially by industry. Out of the 48 RCTs, 17 were industry-funded (35.4%).
The preventive effect of parenteral inactivated influenza vaccine on healthy adults is small: at least 40 people would need vaccination to avoid one ILI case (95% confidence interval (CI) 26 to 128) and 71 people would need vaccination to prevent one case of influenza (95% CI 64 to 80)."*
