You have a ‘flu vaccine to create herd immunity I’ve also never had the ‘flu but take an annual vaccine
A hypothesis put forth by Prof. Bakhdi is that the high number of severe COVID cases in Italy may have been related to their vaccination strategy, which apparently makes a flu, meningitis and some other vaccines mandatory.
His theory is that the adjuvants, immune modulating cytokines, may be responsible for an overshooting immune response to SARS-CoV-2.
He doesn’t say it is proven, but I think it is plausible and should be studied. And he is generally pro vaccinations (obviously as former chair of a Medical institute which also has a vaccine research department), but only if the benefits outweigh the risks. An example where this was not the case according to him was the swine flu scare in 2009/10. Although the overall death rate of the swine flu was twice as high as the incidence for vaccine complications (narcolepsis), the fact that mostly young and healthy people have been vaccinated makes each destroyed life due to narcolepsis more tragic than a swine flu death, which probably takes away less “life years in good health”. Well he didn’t say that explicitly (you can’t weight outcomes publicly without an outcry from some group) but I am paraphrasing.
Rwy20 wrote:
His theory is that the adjuvants, immune modulating cytokines, may be responsible for an overshooting immune response to SARS-CoV-2.
But that should only apply to people who have taken vaccines a short time before being infected with Covid-19? Adjuvants don’t stay in the body. (Actually none of the vaccine does.)
Are that many vaccinations given to adults in Italy?
172driver wrote:
This is a little bit of a tangent, but what is the opinion here – especially of @MedEwok and @kwlf – of getting a flu jab this year? I never had one and as I wrote earlier, never had the flu in living (i.e. more or less adult) memory. To jab or not to jab ?
I will get one, as I did in the last couple of years. I’m considered an at risk group though, due to my profession, and my employer strongly recommends it.
I would still recommend it to anyone else as well, because you don’t want to catch both viruses at the same time and the flu jab protects you from another potentially deadly virus at little to no cost (I had no side effects from the previous vaccinations).
Rwy20 wrote:
A hypothesis put forth by Prof. Bakhdi is that the high number of severe COVID cases in Italy may have been related to their vaccination strategy, which apparently makes a flu, meningitis and some other vaccines mandatory.
This sounds like complete bogus to me. The “air pollution” hypothesis as well as the cultural factors (many generations living closely together) are much more plausible.
Airborne_Again wrote:
But that should only apply to people who have taken vaccines a short time before being infected with Covid-19? Adjuvants don’t stay in the body. (Actually none of the vaccine does.)
This is not my field of expertise, so I am not arguing for or against this hypothesis. But a quick search on Google Scholar does seem to unearth papers that view a long lasting offset of the immune balance (“persistent polyclonal stimulation”), which could lead to autoimmune reactions, as a possible effect to take into account when using cytokines as adjuvants. But I really don’t know what the current state of the science is on this topic.
MedEwok wrote:
This sounds like complete bogus to me.
It is a hypothesis. It deserves to be validated or disproven by research, not by opinion.
Rwy20 wrote:
It is a hypothesis. It deserves to be validated or disproven by research, not by opinion
Of course, I agree.
I will definitely get a flu shot. The years I’ve skipped it generally result in a bad flu…..
I will be getting a ’flu jab, as in previous years.
I can’t comment on the evidence for vaccinations influencing cytokine storms – that would be well outside my sphere of expertise. I suppose the two questions are ‘if I have the flu jab then get COVID shortly after, will it be worse?’ and ‘If I have the ’flu jab then get COVID months after, will it be worse?’ A third question might be ‘If I have a ’flu vaccine before I am exposed to COVID, will I be less likely to become ill because my immune system will have been upregulated and trounce the virus at an early stage?’
I’m afraid I really don’t know the answers to questions like those, if indeed anybody does. We did discuss coinfection with several respiratory viruses towards the start of the thread, and I posted a link to a review paper on the subject. The ’flu vaccine is not live so the situation is different, though there may be some parallels.
Complete layman, but I understand the ‘flu vaccine doesn’t necessarily prevent getting the ’flu, although the symptoms should be less severe, but is designed to create herd immunity.
The consequences of a real ’flu pandemic might make Cv-19 be a walk in the park.
