Why I Don't Get the Flu Shot
As I drive around town I see “Get Your Flu Shot Here” signs in the parking lot of grocery stores and drugstores. They are EVERYWHERE and they enrage me.
I don’t want to be put into a position to tell you what to do with your body, but I will most certainly tell you what I will do with mine, and I feel qualified to do so because I’ve spent the last fourteen years relentlessly studying what it means to feel alive. I can confidently say that, for me, getting the flu shot is out of the question.
I don’t get the flu shot because…
It repeatedly made me sick. I had my last flu shot my senior year in high school. Every year I got the shot, I got sick within a few days and missed school. I don’t think that it gave me the flu; I think the shot weakened my overall vitality and then I picked up whatever pathogen was going around.
When I went to college, I felt like my body was finally all mine, and I refused to get the shot. It just didn’t make any sense to me that I would trust something that made me sick.
Just so you know, I never got the flu.
I don’t get the flu shot because…
Injecting something directly into your bloodstream is a significant threat, and not the kind of threat that makes you stronger, but the kind of threat that makes you weaker. We build immunity through properly managed infections via our mucus membranes, not our bloodstream.
Think about it for a minute: does your body really know the difference between surgery and being wounded on a field in a war? No, it doesn’t. I get that the context is very different, but on the level of the nervous system, having your blood exposed, with your body cut open or punctured, is a form of trauma. So it goes with vaccines: when toxins and dead or alive pathogens suddenly appear in the bloodstream, the body is going to sound the alarm.
For some people, they may never feel the impact of a vaccine, but for others the sounding of the alarm in the body damages them forever.
I don’t get the flu shot because…
Right this minute, on my desk, I am staring at a textbook (that’s right, a 369 page freaking textbook) titled Vaccines and Autoimmunity. It is a collection of 37 articles about this topic.
Enough said.
I don’t get the flu shot because…
I know that epidemics come and go. As Ivan Illich explains in his book Medical Nemesis:
“The study of the evolution of disease patterns provides evidence that during the last century doctors have affected epidemics no more profoundly than priests during earlier times…
The infections that prevailed at the outset of the industrial age illustrate how medicine came by its reputation. Tuberculosis, for instance, reached a peak over two generations. In New York in 1812, the death rate was estimated to be higher than 700 per 10,000; by 1882, when Koch first isolated and cultured the bacillus, it had already declined to 370 per 10,000. The rate was down to 180 when the first sanatorium was opened in 1910, even though “consumption” still held second place in the mortality tables.
After World War II, but before antibiotics became routine, it had slipped into eleventh place with a rate of 48. Cholera, dysentery, and typhoid similarly peaked and dwindled outside the physician’s control. The combined death rate from scarlet fever, diptheria, whooping cough, and measles among children up to fifteen shows that nearly 90 percent of the total decline in mortality between 1860 and 1965 had occurred before the introduction of antibiotics and widespread immunizations” (p15-16).
All of this is written under a heading titled “Doctors’ Effectiveness – An Illusion.”
I don’t get the flu shot because…
I trust my body more than a vaccination. I know that well-managed infections make me (and my kid) stronger. I know that the flu is a BIG inconvenience. I want to acknowledge my privilege in that I have the ability to stay home and rest and not lose my job. The fact that I even have to say this points to the problem: our modern world views the human body as a machine that must keep going, no matter what. There is no humanity, or deep healing in that. For people who can’t be sick because of work, I am truly sorry.
And as far as people dying from the flu…well, fuck, let’s entertain the truth for a moment: we are all going to die. As long as we keep viewing death as a failure, we will not progress as a society. We don’t get to choose how we come into this world and we don’t get to choose how we leave it. For me, the long-term and short-term risks of a flu shot are bigger than getting the actual flu. I will take my chances.
I don’t get the flu shot because…
I don’t trust the ingredients. There is a new classification of diseases called ASIA, which stands for autoimmune/inflammatory syndrome induced by adjuvants. An adjuvant is defined as a substance that enhances an antigen-specific immune response, preferably without triggering one of its own – and that’s what is debatable!
There is evidence that they do trigger autoimmunity (p103, Vaccines & Autoimmunity). This makes sense because if something, like aluminum or monophosphoryl lipid A, is supposed to make the vaccine work better by provoking the immune response, then why wouldn’t this be a problem in some people with an already imbalanced, dysregulated immune system?
And how do you know if you are one of those people? Or have one of those kids? You often don’t! That’s not a risk that I am willing to take.
I don’t get the flu shot because…
I am doubling my chances for trouble. Assuming for a minute that they even work, if I don’t get the shot, my only problem may be getting the infection. But if I do get the shot, then not only do I run the risk of getting the infection anyway (i.e. they don’t always work), I also now run the risk of an adverse reaction.
NO THANKS!
I don’t get the flu shot because…
I don’t think it works.
Consider the reflections of Dr Blake Donaldson, who practiced medicine in the early 1900s, in his book Strong Medicine:
“We know that viral vaccines for influenza and contagious colds have not been particularly efficient. Many of us have seen dreadful reactions, with permanent injury to the nervous system, from such simple things as the smallpox vaccinations…
Does food make a difference? It would be a fearful job to get 500,000 children to do without milk and the other six foods that seem bad in allergy but it might be important. If we had such evidence as that, fifteen years from now we might know something about polio. But unfortunately the [vaccination] program went off half cocked, and now it seems that we will be debating for years the importance or unimportance of the vaccine” (p163-164).
Prophetic, yes?
So really, this conversation with myself comes down to my understanding of host resistance. If I can keep my immune system strong with good food, herbal medicine, plenty of sleep, and appropriate exercise, then I’m not likely to get sick with the flu and if I do…I’m going to take advantage of the rest and opportunity to heal because I must need it.
If you want to learn more about the vaccine controversy, I would recommend the following three resources: The Greater Good and Vaxxed are excellent documentaries, and Vaccination: Examining the Record by Judith DeCava is a well-referenced book on the subject available through Selene River Press. There are many, many more.
In addition, I have personally been faced with the reality that allergy shots are also vaccines. I endured months of weekly allergy shots as a young teenager, and I believe that they injured my immune system in a way that I may never fully recover. This opinion piece can begin to shed light on this topic.
I know that this is a controversial conversation, so thanks for being here with me. In the spirit of humor, I think that JP Sears does an outstanding job of touching on the dynamics of this conversation in his three-minute video titled How To Be Mind Controlled so check it out if you need a chuckle.
Consider the truth in peace, my friends.
Love,
Charlotte