On the Media had three good stories this week about vaccine hysteria.

Ugh. Sometimes I see what people freak out over and I just want to hit myself in the head with a claw hammer. Not to mention the douchebags with the bully pulpits trying to politicize a public health issue.

We've had one hell of a time just finding someone who'll give my pregnant wife a flu shot, and pregnant women are among those deemed to need it the most. She's called all over town, and finally today found out that the health department is giving thimerosal-free shots at our local minor league ballpark downtown. This strikes me as appropriate, because if athletes are allowed to shoot up there, then I should be too.

I'm pretty sure I just had the piggy sniffles. It wasn't horrible, but it was pretty bad. In terms of lab germs, I've been pretty lucky in the past six years, but this really knocked me down for most of a week. But, it didn't send me to the hospital.

I don't know how I feel about vaccinations. Also pretty sure that the kids are coming down with something and will keep them home as needed.

Flu shots for me were last week, when I was sick. Seasonal flu shots for the kids aren't until December.

Best wishes to you, MCT, and your family.

Talked with someone tonight who will not have his 3 teen daughters get the H1N1 vaccination at the end of this month because "vaccinations cause you to be more vulnerable to disease." I just had no response.

OMG arse_hat that makes me speechless!

Vaccinations are yet another topic that I can't discuss with some of my friends. In fact, I can talk religion more comfortably (by orders of magnitude).

Somebody from college I keep adding and removing from my News Feed was talking about vaccines the other day. Remove, again.

Vaccinations are yet another topic that I can't discuss with some of my friends.

It's gotten like this with me and some members of my family. Hilariously, I have BOTH kinds of anti-vaxers- the leftie kind AND the right-wing kind.

Gah.

I work in a pretty scientifically-literate office (many people with backgrounds in stats and applied math), and the hand-wringing that goes on about even the normal flu shot just astounds me.

"I had the flu shot for the first time last year, and I got sicker than I've ever been -- I'm never doing it again!"

"I had a friend or a friend whose arm was so sore he lift anything for a week!"

"I just don't think it's a good idea to get yourself infected with a weak strain of something you try to avoid in the first place."

That said, I didn't really believe the "fainting-after-getting-a-shot-thing" was really anything other than a needle-phobia, but someone explained it to me in detail this year. He said it's not fear of the needle or the pain of the injection, it's that his nervous system goes into overdrive about 10 minutes after getting a shot (any shot) -- heart rate goes crazy, etc. It's not something he can control, and he really has no psychological explanation for it. I wonder if a lot of the flu shot phobia can be explained by people who don't feel like a) either explaining this to others or b) admitting that their bodies have a kind of scary automatic reaction to getting shots.

Needle phobia is one of the few anxiety responses that actually causes a sudden *drop* in one's blood pressure; fainting in response to needles is pretty common because of that. (Unlike with other phobias, where the best way to head them off is to try to relax and calm your body, people with needle phobias usually find it most helpful to tense up as much as possible while getting poked.)