Are you really so sure?

So, every year, my company hosts a flu shot clinic in the lobby.  And every year, assholes – mostly stupid middle aged women – insist that I need to get my flu shot, and that only fools don’t get flu shots.

Of course, when I ask them how they possibly survived when they were my age (before the flu shots were invented), they give me a blank stare.  They say that they got sick.  I ask for dates, and they can’t give me any – mostly because it either never happend, or what’s more likely, it was so inconsequential that they couldn’t remember the year or the month in which they got a flu they wish they could have avoided if only the magic of flu shots had existed in their heyday.

I have never, nor will ever, get a flu shot.  And now it turns out that you’re twice as likely to get swine flu if you get one.  “The flu” is not fatal (unless you’re an infant or circling the drain).  Swine flu can be.  Who’s the risk-taker now?

UPDATE: Girl’s life ruined by flu shot.  Sometimes I hate being right all the time.

If all of our scientific discovery over the last 100 years has taught us anything, it’s how little we know.  Wasn’t it Plato who said if I am genius it is because I know how little I know?  Socrates maybe?  Aristotle?

At the turn of the last century, the head of the U.S. Patent Office was quoted as saying that he doesn’t think it’s likely that we’ll see too many more patents because everything that can be invented has already been invented.  We look back at the absurdity of that statement and laugh and laugh and laugh.  However, that does not stop people from jumping on a bandwagon, like the flu shot, which has more questions than answers, and assert with authority that they are a necessity of modern life.

The same is true about global warming.  I watched in horror, my jaw agape, as some shit-for-brains from CNN International said with a straight face that Greenland’s ice sheet has been shrinking over the last ten years and that must mean that the planet is doomed.  Everybody knows about the ice age – you know, the one that ended about 15,000 years ago.  A lot of people don’t realize that there were 9 or 10 ice ages before the last one – indicating that we are in a cyclical glacial-interglacial period whose time scale is approximately 30,000 years.  Based on timescales like that, you’d have to be a total idiot to think that observing anything over a period of 10 or even 100 years tells us anything at all.  Keep that in mind when you pay Obama’s carbon credit tax on your heating bills this winter.

As it turns out, flu shots, too, are possibly a double edged sword.  Is it only now that we discover this?  Is it only 25 years from now when we find out that there’s a statistically significant increased chance of dying from pneumonia beyond the age of 60 if you took seasonal flu shots?  I don’t know.  I don’t have a crystal ball.  I can’t predict the future.

Here’s what I know.  I know that regular old influenza has an extremely remote chance of killing me.  I know that swine flu has a remarkable chance of killing me (5%?  10%?).  I know that flu shots have existed for less than one generation.  I do not know if flu shots have unforeseen side effects.  I know that having the flu once a year does not have unforeseen side effects.  Should I get a flu shot?

If this were on a standardized test, the answer would be no.  The middle of the bell curve gets half of questions like this wrong.  They can’t even work out how to minimize risks to their own health, but they vote every year.