Written By: Celeste McGovern
Two of my daughters arrived home from primary school last week with public health packages in their bags. It’s that time of year again, when nurses are out in force like army recruitment officers, waging a war on deadly germs and rounding up volunteers for vaccines.
This year in the United Kingdom the intranasal flu vaccine is being rolled out. It’s already been used in the United States where 14 to 15 million doses of AstraZeneca’s FluMist are currently in distribution for this flu season but this is the first year it is being offered under the brand name Fluenza Tetra in the UK to all children older than 24 months and it is heavily promoted by public health officials. They’ve even produced a “Flu Hero” cartoon directed at children in which a superhero gives a little boy a nasal flu vaccine which, like a bite from a radioactive spider, transforms him into a superhero himself with super defenses.
I hate the flu as much as other parents, but the public health information struck me as superficial and smacked of a sales pitch, so I decided to look a little deeper into the vaccine and here are the top half dozen reasons my children won’t be going near it…
