Annual Flu Shot

I understand the point of vaccines. Many of them save lives and provide some sort of protection from the billions of diseases that plague the earth at this point in time.

HOWEVER...

I am against mandated vaccinations for all people, and I'm against flu vaccines.

Polio is no longer killing all of our children in America each year. They say the polio vaccine got it under control and nearly eradicated it.

Flu, on the other hand, is not going to get wiped out from some dumb ass vaccine that hasn't shown proven efficacy. Getting the flu shot does not mean you are immune from the flu for that year, nor does it guarantee that you will not spread it to someone else when you do get sick.

Plus, the vaccines we get each year are fighting last year's strains and have little to do with protecting against the strains being passed around for this season. Which, makes the vaccine essentially useless. USELESS.

When hospitals mandate the flu vaccine for all of their nurses, they simply offer it to the patients. The patients can refuse with no backlash, but nurses/doctors/employees are either fired or forced to wear a surgical mask. If the flu vaccine so important, shouldn't patients be forced to protect everyone else the way nurses/doctors/employees are forced to? Should they be strong-armed into getting the fucking vaccine as well? If it's so important, that is...

I also understand that it is something that Medicare/Medicaid is forcing on hospitals saying that if they do not have over 90% of their staff receiving the flu vaccine, then the funding will be decreased, though I've heard the decrease is a mere 2%. Hey hospitals, if you take the 2% hit, I'm sure your staff would be willing to bust their assess to go raise money in the community or take a slight paycheck cut of a dollar or two. Or, like you do everything else, just up the price for all of us patients. Isn't that not how it goes when the men in the offices at the top want a raise?

I get the Tdap (redone for nursing school), I got the MMR, I got all of the Hep B and children vaccines when I was a kid, and I hope that those vaccines actually help. I didn't get measles, I didn't get mumps, I didn't die of polio, and I have not yet gotten lock jaw and died from a rusty nail. L-rd willing I don't have Hep B... I'm not turning yellow. However, the flu comes to most of us each year. They don't have a vaccine for colds... Is that next? Why not get vaccines or, better yet, cures for diseases that actually plague and kill people. Put funding into the cure for HIV/AIDS, cure herpes, cure fucking cancer! The flu vaccine is a waste of time and funding. But, that was the point, wasn't it?

It was a vaccine developed to not actually promise to eradicate any disease. It's something they could make sound really important, and make it sound like it would save millions of lives each year, while not actually having to be measured in order to prove it's worth. It's something that makes Big Pharma billions of dollars annually because they got Medicare/Medicaid on board in order to literally force and coerce every hospital into forcing and coercing all of their employees into compliance.

It's like the EpiPen bullshit where that lady jacked up the price for EpiPens from $100 to $600, for an absolutely medically necessary and life saving medicine. Where did the money go? You guessed it, most of it went into the lady's pocket in the form of a huge salary increase.

Exactly what Big Pharma is doing with mandating flu vaccines.

Where are the protests? Where are the fights? Where are the nurses who are willing to stand up and refuse this fucking vaccine? Together we could stop this, but everyone is too lazy and too scared to send in the little piece of paper to refuse the vaccine. If enough of us refused, there's no way they could fire us all. Especially for those of us in small towns, where both hospitals in the town share the same batch of nurses because most nurses have 2 jobs.

Y'all, Ontario did it! One of the nursing unions of Ontario Canada fought the flu vaccines and stated that forcing nurses to wear a mask after refusing the vaccine was a violation of patient privacy because the masks are used for shaming the employees who refuse the vaccine. Masks then lead to patient questions and harassment by other employees and doctors. *All of which I have experienced in my short time I've been a health care worker (starting with being a CNA at the Alzheimer's home)*

So now I stand on the edge of losing my job or pumping solutions into my body that I absolutely do not agree with. Solutions that have been shown to cause early onset Alzheimer's and fertility problems. Solutions that have no proven desired effects. That benefit to risk ratio is pretty abysmal.