JOE MACLEOD

Now Is the Time to Get Your Flu Shot

Sep 19, 2018 9:53PM EDT

Creative Director for HMM DAILY. Once and future game show contestant.

Do you get the flu shot? Are you against the flu shot? Do you think if you get the Flu Shot you will get the Flu? Are you against vaccines in general? Don’t you want to be healthy and stanch the flow of the flu? Do you believe things that are based on science?

It’s the 100th Anniversary of the 1918 Flu Pandemic, when 500 million people caught the flu and 675,000 Americans died, out of 50 million people worldwide. A good way to observe this occasion would be to not get the flu, eh?

I want to be healthy, and I believe in Medical Science, so I usually get a flu shot. Sometimes I forget to get the shot. Weeks go by and then I get that feeling, like when I find myself driving in my car without my safety belt fastened, my seat belt, so at any minute I am about to get in a crash and go sailing out of my car and become a highway statistic of death, so I strap myself in and I go get that flu shot, but usually by then it’s the heart of “Cold and Flu Season,” during which time I typically have a cold, and one shouldn’t get a flu shot when one has a cold, because you’ll end up giving your cold the flu or something, I dunno. All I know is I trust the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention here, and they say I should get a flu shot, because it’s a good way to not get the flu, and that in turn is a good way to lessen the severity of the deadly global reach of the flu. However, I would like a teensy-weensy amount of increased clarity from my CDC on when exactly I should get that shot, because here’s the quote from our CDC, of America:

While the flu season usually starts in full force in December, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and many doctors are urging people to get flu shots by October at the latest.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

“By October” is kinda not helpful, because that already puts your head into the “sometime in October” mode, you know? By Halloween? By Global Handwashing Day? (Every day in Cold and Flu Season should be Global Handwashing Day.)

I would like my CDC to say stuff like: THE DEADLINE FOR YOUR FLU SHOT (THE THING YOU CAN DO TO GIVE YOURSELF YOUR BEST CHANCE AT AVOIDING THE FLU) IS OCTOBER 1. GET THE SHOT BY OCTOBER THE FIRST AND YOU WILL BE STRIKING A BLOW AT THE HEART OF COLD AND FLU SEASON, WHICH IS IN THE FALL AND WINTER, AND OCTOBER ONE IS ALREADY IN THE FALL, AND IT’S ONLY A MATTER OF TIME BEFORE YOU GET A COLD, AND THAT WILL LOUSE UP GETTING THE FLU SHOT AND YOU’LL PROBABLY END UP GOING FROM A CASE OF THE SNIFFLES TO A SLIP AND FALL RIGHT ON SOME FLU. REMEMBER THE PANDEMIC OF NINETEEN HUNDRED AND EIGHTEEN. DON’T SAY WE DIDN’T WARN YOU.

Still, it’s more helpful than the advice the authorities were giving out in 1918, when the New York Times published the rules issued by the Surgeon General of the Army for avoiding respiratory disease, including “help by choosing and chewing your food well” and “Avoid tight clothes, tight shoes, tight gloves—seek to make nature your ally not your prisoner.” Everyone was being knocked down by it: the Kaiser, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt. Officials tried banning near beer and boxing and “movies” (quotation marks courtesy of the New York Times) and none of it got things under control.

Plus, you don’t have to get the needle-shot, you can get the thing that uses high pressure to blast the vaccine into your arm, or you can do the LAIV (live attenuated influenza vaccine) intranasally, into one of your nose-holes, kinda like those goofy neti pot nose cleaners, only you’re getting a solid snort of Medical Science.

Everything is political these days, so why should flu shot be an exception, right? Well, flu shot is not political, flu shot is straight up Medicine for the Benefit of Society, it helps reduce the amount of flu suffered by the population, and that helps everybody. That’s why it’s so easy to get a flu shot! Flu shot opportunities are everywhere, and you don’t have to look hard to get one free, no charge. OK, so that means flu shot is Socialized Medicine, never mind. Roll up your sleeve or open your nose and let the future in.