According to just about everyone in the medical sciences Australia is heading for the worst flu season in years, and already two people have died in SA thanks to the current strain getting a foothold ahead of winter 2019 with 1300 flu cases logged in the last week, according to 5AA.
And the advice is that everyone should be getting themselves jabbed ASA freakin’ P. So: why aren’t we all doing it? And we’re not, just to be clear: the maximum estimates are around 60 per cent of the population get the vaccine (which is about 39 per cent too low for herd immunity, team).
Personally, I suspect that part of the reason is that “flu” is a word we expect to follow “cold &” on pill boxes and thus we just kind of assume that it’s not a big deal that can be handled with some over the counter remedy, rather than remembering that influenza is one of the most deadly diseases in human history with a death toll that dwarfs the sum of all wars on the planet.
Part of the reason is that we’re generally at our healthiest in our working years and figure “eh, if I get sick I get sick, it’s not that big a deal.”
And that’s a problem because vaccination isn’t just about the individual benefits of you, the healthy strapping young thing reading this screed. You can probably get the flu and have it not be a big deal (although the two people who died in SA were both young, healthy people so… y’know, maybe not).
But when you have the flu, you’re infectious.
Vaccination is about stopping the spread of a virus through the population so it doesn’t get transferred from largely-healthy you to, say, a newborn baby whose immune system hasn’t developed and whose tiny lungs are easy to disable, or the person on chemotherapy for cancer whose body is going to shut down if they get a chest infection.
So why does a country who are still thankfully very pro-vaccination treat this one as being voluntary?
One issue is that supplies can be limited and the flu is annoyingly good at mutating into hot, trendy new strains each time so stockpiling vaccines is impossible.
That being said, flu shots are mandatory for workers in some areas. Last year the NSW government made it compulsory for medical workers in “high risk clinical areas”, while the federal government advised that workers in aged care should get the vaccination but stopped short of making it compulsory.
So maybe it’s time we took matters into our own… um, immune system, and got that injection.
Do it. Society will thank you.