• Question: should everyone get he flu injection because my brother got it two weeks ago and he now has the flu?

    Asked by 927drud32 to Anne, Florence, Mark, Neil, Sinead on 6 Nov 2015.
    • Photo: Anne Moore

      Anne Moore answered on 6 Nov 2015:

      Sorry to hear that your brother has the flu. Firstly, are you sure it is an influenza virus infection and not a bad cold? Secondly, if he does have the flu then there is a chance that the vaccine didn’t work (because he got infected). However he 100% most definitely did not get the flu from the vaccine as this is physcically impossible. The vaccine does not contain any influenza virus. It just contains subunit antigen, protein parts, of the influenza virus.

      There are clear guidelines about who should & shouldn’t be vaccinated.
      These can be found on the HSE website:
      http://www.hse.ie/eng/health/immunisation/pubinfo/fluvaccine/flulandingpg.html

      You can also see what is in the flu vaccine by looking at the summary of product characteristics:
      http://www.medicines.ie/medicine/10483/SPC/Inactivated+Influenza+Vaccine+%28Split+Virion%29+BP/#tableOfContents

      Hypersensitivity to the active substances, to any of the excipients or to any component that may be present as traces such as eggs (ovalbumin, chicken proteins), neomycin, formaldehyde and octoxinol-9.

      Vaccination should be postponed in case of moderate or severe febrile disease or acute disease.

      I hope your brother recovers soon!

    • Photo: Sinead Balgobin

      Sinead Balgobin answered on 11 Nov 2015:

      He probably has a different flu, or a different illness- you can’t get the flu from the vaccine since it only contains bits of the virus so your immune system can learn how to detect and kill the flu virus. Either he got a different illness, or the vaccine didn’t work well enough for his body to learn how to fight it off.

      I think everyone who doesn’t have a very strong immune system should get the vaccine. They are expensive to make and can be difficult to make, so our first priority should be to protect people whose body isn’t as good at fighting infection- like young children and old people. Maybe one day you could come up with a cure that means we can defeat the flu?

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