Flu jab effective?

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Red17

Guru
Location
South London
The flu jab is based on a best guess of the anticipated flu strains each year, but I was just wondering whether the health service actually says whether they got the right strains, or they prefer us not to know.
 

Drago

Legendary Member
They do state which strains they're targeting. It's not difficult to hit Google 6 month later and see what the prevalent strains turned out to be.
 

fossyant

Ride It Like You Stole It!
Location
South Manchester
It's a gamble, may or may not work. May make symptoms less etc. Worth doing if you are or have vulnerable people in your family that you can't avoid if ill. I haven't bothered with either since the covid jabs stopped for us mid 50's. MrsF and my parents have had them.

Touch wood, I've not had anything in the last few years, despite working in a Uni. I'm not often out mixing in pubs etc.
 
I had mine this week, private but work are very kindly reimbursing anyone that has it.

The little leaflet I got with it listed the strains its targetting.
 

lazybloke

Priest of the cult of Chris Rea
Location
Leafy Surrey
Survivors of the 1918 Spanish flu were believed to have residual resistance/immunity to the Swine flu pandemic.
On that basis, building up a catalogue of slightly different flu vaccinations each year seems like there might be a cumulative benefit to all of the included strains. Maybe.

And they are effective: I've looked previously at UK winter flu stats, and recall a fairly significant fall in the numbers when the seasonal flu jab was introduced.
 
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Psamathe

Senior Member
(I'm not a medic but) my understanding is that live attenuated and tri-valent vaccinces will give a degree of protection even against those variants is is not targetted for. Max benefits for the designed variants but reduced risk for others (depending on variant, etc.)

Ian
 
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