My Twenty Years+ on The Flu Vaccine & Why I Gave It Up.

So-called "Virus Interference" might explain the mixed results I enjoyed thanks to twenty-one years on the flu vaccine.

Following an anaphylaxis related asthma attack in SW London in 1994, the treatment for which nearly killed me, I began a two decades+ spell on the flu vaccine. I took 21 doses between 1994 & 2015 when I gave them up.

At first, I was enamoured. I suffered not a single sniffle for at least a couple of years. At this time, the flu vaccine was for vulnerable folks like myself & medical staff only. The general public could not just buy a flu vaccine whenever they wanted one like they can now. At the time it was said that the risks of the vaccine for any normal healthy person were greater than the risk of flu.

Edit: Just to add that, now that any old person can just “buy” a flu vaccine, people who are at no risk whatsoever from flu can easily be killed by the vaccine instead… Such as in this case here…

2018 Family considering legal action after Sydney man's sudden death

Over the next two decades, even as the flu vaccine was commercialised & sold, sold, sold to the general public, it's efficacy slowly collapsed for me. After about ten years I started shifting my vaccine from Sept/Oct to early Dec in order to avoid Xmas/NYE illness. I'm a DJ & producer so losing New Years Eve to respiratory infections was a regular annoyance. I also missed Xmas's with family & friends.

By around the year 2010 I actually began to wonder if the vaccine was helping at all & by the time I gave it up in 2015 I was even concerned that it might be making things worse! Since I gave up the vaccine, I have become convinced that it WAS making things worse. Since 2015 I have had no serious, long spells of respiratory illness, something that was a regular winter feature for me. Sometimes I'd be ill for weeks, only to appear to recover & then get laid up for weeks again, only a month or so later. But since giving up the vaccine in 2015, I've had no antibiotics & no steroids. Not for respiratory infection, anyway. I had a dental infection a couple years ago...

All this illness-despite-vaccine business was something of a mystery to me until I had to start looking into all this covid crap that broke early 2020. Obviously, being asthmatic with a history of anaphylaxis meant that I was vulnerable to both the covid virus AND the vaccines & this meant I had to do plenty of research to be sure that I was right to forego the new efforts for covid.

While poking around papers on vaccines, I came across at least two studies that suggested those in receipt of the flu vaccine were being made susceptible to serious infections if they then come across a non-flu virus. Priming the immune system for flu is all well & good IF flu then comes along. If a coronavirus or other virus comes along instead, the immune system that is primed for flu by the flu vaccine does not know what to do & this can result in a serious infection & resulting hospitalisation.

THIS might easily explain my problems! I was coming across non-flu viruses instead, probably coronaviruses, & my immune system was unable to mount a defence because the vaccine had primed it for flu!

Incidentally, I was intubated in 1994 with improperly sterilised kit & contracted hospital-born Strep Pneumonia that was resistant to all the antibiotics. I discovered later that I had around a 5% chance of survival. I spent ten days in ICU, seven of those unconscious, sedated on litres of Ketamine. Ketamine is a remarkable drug that brings anaesthesia but without depressing the cardiovascular system. If it was not for the nightmarish, months long psychedelic trip litre's of the stuff induced, I'd have been even happier to survive! It took around three months to recover & regain my strength. I woke up in ICU with nothing but skin & bone, every muscle in my body had melted away! I was not 100% right until six months had passed! I have always been nuts so the Ket didn't do much to make me any crazier than I already was ;)

Two of the flu-vaccine-primes-for-flu-but-not-other-viruses papers I found since covid broke are:

Influenza vaccination and respiratory virus interference among Department of Defense personnel during the 2017–2018 influenza season

"Receiving influenza vaccination may increase the risk of other respiratory viruses, a phenomenon known as virus interference."

Flu shots and the risk of coronavirus infections

"A randomized placebo-controlled trial in children showed that flu shots increased fivefold the risk of acute respiratory infections caused by a group of noninfluenza viruses, including coronaviruses."

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