When is the best time (April, May?) to get the flu vaccine?
When Is The Best Time (April, May?) to Get The Flu Vaccine?
bluespider on 03/04/2024 - 11:00
Comments
Flu vaccine only lasts 3 - 4 months
So the later the better.
So late May/Early June
One year many got the flu vax in April and ended up getting the flu at the end of the flu season
between 3PM & 3:30PM
because 230 is reserved for dentistry
.Dad gets an upvote
yes that too
https://www.healthdirect.gov.au/flu-vaccine-faqs
When should I have the flu shot?
Your immunity is strongest and most effective for 3 to 4 months after you are vaccinated. Flu season in Australia usually runs from June to September, peaking in August, so it is important to get your flu shot in April or May.
That doesn't seem to add up. April + 4 months is only July and you still have two more months of flu season to go. May + 4 months still only just catches the peak. If coverage is closer to three months than four, April or May doesn't cover you for the peak at all.
Takes about 2 weeks for the flu shot to be fully effective in the body
Going by the above stats, I would say early may to get the shot which hopefully covers up to 4 months.
make sure you know what brand it is
Cashback?
They were free
@Gdsamp: I would get a refund from your education facilities. They obviously didn’t teach you reasoning.
Is there a difference?
yes
April 20 :')
May the 4th
More or less now. Flu is starting to peak early this year - as of last week there were already more than 11k reported cases in NSW alone.
Oh thanks for the reminder!
Never.
When is the best time (April, May?)
yes
Are there any benefits to getting the flu, not purposely of course?
I feel pretty amazing when I recover, like better than before getting the flu. Maybe because I don't eat much and get plenty of rest.
Of course, I always regret not getting the flu shot when I actually do get the flu.
How many times have you actually had the flu?
Me?
Maybe 2-3 times over 60 years. Last was about 20 years ago.
Was replying to @TEER3X
Sounds like they get it all the time which would be strange.
My work pays for it, so whenever they decide.
Only doing it because I see it as a $20 saving and a free 20-30 minute break
Best time is right before you get sick
It takes some time for it to work though, like 10 days or whatever. So right before you get sick won't work.
I like to test how good my flu shot is, by licking all the trolley handles down at my local Wollies after I got it.
I always wondered who that person was…
I try hard to leave it until late April, early May. The coverage is 6 months. People make the mistake of getting it in March and come September/October, theyve been hit with the Spring wave.
My GP recommends the same.
Your immunity is strongest and most effective for 3 to 4 months after you are vaccinated. Flu season in Australia usually runs from June to September, peaking in August, so it is important to get your flu shot in April or May.
Source: https://www.healthdirect.gov.au/flu-vaccine-faqs
I generally try to get it a little later (eg. May / June) .
Best is when the new shots arrive for the new strains…
If you have already started, best time is regularly yearly
I was going to ask if it is good time to get a covid boost as well. The XBB.1.5 version is available.
Looking at the data, the numbers are well down on last year though, especially in WA. No sign of a winter peak coming (yet).
Still more common than flu, I think?The gov't is no long recommending boosters to healthy under 65s, but is offering it free annually. I guess they have a big stockpile already paid for that will go to waste.
Since we've already paid $billions from taxes, is it worth getting now, with the flu jab? I'm not so far off 65, so more risk.(No conspiracy nutter answers please.)
Can I get the influenza (flu) vaccine and COVID-19 vaccine at the same time?
You can get a COVID-19 vaccine and a flu vaccine at the same time.
There’s a potential of an increase in mild to moderate adverse events when more than 1 vaccine is given at the same time.
Children can also safely receive other vaccines any time before, after or at the same time as their COVID-19 vaccination. If your child has recently received another vaccine (within the past 7 days), it‘s best to let your immunisation provider know so they can correctly assess any side effects.
As with any other vaccine, vaccination will be deferred if you’re unwell. If you experience a side effect such as fever following vaccination, other vaccines will not be administered until the side effect has resolved.
"Speechless" (well almost)
1: trying to control others comments. WRONG
2: well you know..38th booster 😂🤣 FUNNYWhen you post on the internet you need to put your big boy pants on and accept you cannot stop others from writing whatever they like as a response.
My Dr normally recommends May, but he has advised me to get it now this year, as there are a lot of flu cases around already. He also suggested getting another one in three months in order to get full coverage for this winter. I expect this is because I am elderly.
Yeah, be careful about posting personal GP advice. It would be very exceptional to get two flu vaccines in one season.
Yes, he did say it is an exceptional year for flu. Obviously, everybody needs to get there own GP advice.
My GP recommended April after I asked whether it's OK if I waited till early May.
Unusual. There don't seem to be a lot of cases yet. GP must think it will peak early?
2022 peaked early and high - a bad flu year because we'd opened the borders after covid.
https://www.immunisationcoalition.org.au/news-data/influenza…
Flu cases are already at double the weekly rate of last year’s flu season, which hit at least 300,000 Australians.
https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/as-…https://www.smh.com.au/healthcare/it-s-not-just-you-flu-seas…
https://www.medicalrepublic.com.au/flu-season-looming-large/…
She provided a reason but for the life of me I could not remember wat it was now
Never. One of most foolish decisions I made was to get the COVID jab.
Why?
Chest pains, heart palpitations etc. Was never the same after it, and I'm in my mid 20s. Was perfectly healthy and fine before. One GP I went to even admitted the jabs affect males worse than females.
This is about the flu jab:
"When is the best time (April, May?) to get the flu vaccine?"
Although I feel for people affected by COVID jabs, posting on an unrelated subject is not appropriate.
Was responding to bloke asking why. Regardless, I don't trust any jab more than my own natural immunity. Better off without.
I was talking about your first response when out of the blue you said:
"Never. One of most foolish decisions I made was to get the COVID jab."
That was not in response to anyone. It was a direct statement under the OP, and had nothing to do with the flu jab.
Again, I get your anger about the whole situation, I'm also not happy about the mandate but it has nothing to do with the flu jab.
Shouldn't another question to ask be "should I get the flu shot?"
Also I thought that we were done with the 'shot' terminology and now are calling them vaccines?
English is a wonderful language. Sometimes it even allows for more than one word to mean the same thing.
Oh I agree the wonders of English never cease to amaze. It even allows for subtlety rather than directness. And the redefinition of words too. For instance, a vaccine used to be something that provided immunity but is now defined as something producing an immune response. The word 'shot' didn't come with a promise, but yes, now vaccine is somewhat more synonymous with shot.
'Shot' is essentially a reference to the process of administering the vaccine. It is the same as drinking a 'shot' of vodka. The reference is explicit, direct, and not new.
If you have recently read the phrase "immune response" in the context of vaccinations I suspect that you have been reading something written with the intention of trying to make how vaccines actually work clearer to Cookers, however it's hardly a phrase that's in common use outside of specialist media.
If getting a flu shot comes with a "promise", it's the one it always had. That is, that you will be less likely to catch the disease after getting one, and if you do get the flu your symptoms are likely to be less severe than would be the case if you hadn't had a shot.
@AngoraFish: Let's drop the condescension and presumptions. I get that +1s are mined from these type of posts but as we see above it turns into a slinging match and becomes pretty pointless.
'Shot' is essentially a reference to the process of administering the vaccine. It is the same as drinking a 'shot' of vodka. The reference is explicit, direct, and not new.
That's a pretty good explanation.
My whole point was referencing the subtle changes in language that we have on contentious topics. Not really sure why the mention of 'Cookers' but I don't think it's helpful in discourse to throw around names that are meant to belittle people for having an opinion you don't like. Personally I don't agree with the views of this group of people you refer to. I do my own research and form my own point of view, and in my opinion we'd all be a lot better off in all areas of life if more people took this approach.@glennski: I'm still not entirely clear what your point actually is though. You seem to have a point, but you're not actually coming out and saying it, and beating around the bush is just leaving other people to make assumptions about what you're trying to say. Certainly this doesn't seem to be a discussion about semantics.
For what it's worth, "do your own research" is typically just code for poke around the internet until you find some random blogger making a plausible-sounding argument that supports your existing gut feeling, then do it again and again until you are so far down that rabbit hole that you have become completely detached from reality.
I haven't negged you btw.
@AngoraFish: Point was to point out my perception of the change in language and start a conversation on it. I get your point that it can be seen as beating around the bush. I feel sometimes that being really direct can cause others to close their minds a bit.
I can see the point of view about 'do your own research' but let me offer my take on it. Yes some people will go hunting for the confirmation bias and think that anyone who is against the government or <insert organisation here> must be telling the truth or correct. And there are a lot of grifters out there to take advantage of that. I research both sides of the argument and motives and then form my own view. As far as being detached from reality - see flat earthers and sovereign citizens. Those guys make it very easy to ad hominem or 'guilt by association' anyone on any topic by lumping them all together as cookers or anti vaxxers, and from the headlines I've read in the last few years the media has been happy to stoke division.
In the case of covid related things my thought process is along the lines of:
* Lockdowns helped one of the largest transfers of wealth the world has seen (rich get richer, poor get poorer) and in Australia this is at taxpayer cost
* For the companies that make the vaccines the single biggest driver of profit in their history
* The abandonment of scientific process and evidence when it came to certain things e.g masks - you need to wear masks/no you don't/yes you do, and somehow wearing cloth masks would prevent spread.
* We were told vaccine uptake was the key to ending lockdown because the R value would drop and the virus would die out. I got 2 jabs because I wanted lockdowns to end. Presumably the advice was based on evidence that the transmissibility and/or susceptibility dropped after vaccination, and I remember seeing the news that Pfizer had a 90 something percent efficacy rate of preventing infection based on trials. Real world evidence would indicate this was never the case as pretty much everyone got covid and still continues to regardless of vaccination status. The quality of the trials and parameters used in selection plus the business relationships of companies doing the trials with who pays them to do the trials is another topic altogether. Yes there might be cases where the vaccine could prevent serious illness or death but why did the whole population need it?
* The massive media campaign as well as regulatory body action taken against potential treatments for covid. Ivermectin was poo pooed as horse dewormer when infact it is also human medicine that has been around for decades with little to no side effects and is out of patent == cheap to make/low profit. If there were effective treatments discovered before the vaccine finished development then there would be no need for emergency authorisation and rollout. Research studies are now showing that paxlovid has little to no efficacy in reducing symptoms, but the non subsidised cost for a course is over $1000.
* The funding model of our regulatory body (TGA). Like their counterpart in the US (FDA) they are funded by industry, which is not a good look for independence. If you've worked in government before you'll have heard all sorts of stories on how people protect their budgets and fight for funding. Also of concern would be how senior people can retire from that agency after being responsible for the swift approval of the vaccines, and then go and work for an organisation that represents the interests of the pharmaceutical industry. That is a really bad look which mirrors the 'revolving door' they have in America where executives that 'help' their customers are later rewarded with a job so they can use their personal relationships and ties back at their old employer to lobby more effectivelyLet's not about the human behaviour in these times where a lot of our populations inner fascist was more than happy to come out and shame anyone who didn't get on board. Again this wouldn't have been helped by the medias role in this stoking fear. They received support from the government for purposes of reporting on covid, and as it is with the state of journalism (thanks to Google/Facebook sucking advertising dollars away) the most important thing is the click. And what gets clicking better than anything is something to be scared of. I remember seeing a headline only in the 2nd half of 2023 "Breaking - 91 year old dies with covid".
Putting all this together I don't think that somehow the powers that be are trying to thin the population, I don't think that our politicians have vast pharma share portfolios, I don't allege that there's any sort of formal conspiracy with these points - no-one has to get together and plan all this out (i.e this isn't a theory on some sort of conspiracy). All there has to be is a convergence of interests for these things to happen, which would be business as usual considering the institutions/mechanisms/organisations already in place. Have a look at the vast amount of money that has been made by the worlds biggest businesses. The pharmaceutical industry is the most litigated against in the world and I think it's reasonable to want scrutiny when their number one interest is probably not safety, but profits.
Does thinking these things make me an anti-vaxxer nutter?
I think that more people should be mad as hell about the tax payer dollars spent in the last few years, the damage done to our economy, and how and why the decisions that were made were made. I'm not holding my breath for a royal commission though as both major parties put their hands up on these decisions so there will be a huge lack of support for anything that could really get to the bottom of it.
@glennski: Yeah, I'd go along the nutter tag. All of that is just a laundry list of out of context anti-vax talking points, mixed in with some pent up resentment and a sincere need to find someone to blame.
Your criticisms span the usual realm of mixing up science, policy decisions by politicians and media coverage as if they are all the same thing; you take early scientific uncertainty as a terminal flaw in the scientific method and/or evidence of corruption; and you give excessive weight to minor statistical inconsistencies and trivial differences of medical opinion.
You then go on to make your own sweeping, speculative generalisations and entirely made up statistics as if your personal gut feeling and misunderstanding of basic pharmacology and epidemiology has any evidentiary weight whatsoever, and then add in a dollop of the wisdom of hindsight and a spoonful of big pharma and public service corruption.
I was almost willing to run with your argument for a bit until you started down the Ivermectin rabbit hole, which has literally never been recommended as a treatment for COVID but got a big run because a disturbingly large percentage of the world's right-leaning population takes Trump's rambling brain vomits seriously (the fact that some people who took it got better would be more impressive if most people who get COVID don't get better either way).
The common thread in all of this conspiratorial thinking is the same flaw that is common to all good conspiracies. A bunch of mostly unrelated speculations and factoids are thrown at the wall and presented in isolation and free of relevant context but that collectively leave the impression that, surely, where there's smoke there's fire. Lee Harvey Oswald visited Cuban and Soviet embassies while he was in Mexico City, ergo, John F. Kennedy's assassination was a communist plot! I mean, nobody has any evidence of an actual plot, but he was in the building for half an hour, so, do your own research!
@AngoraFish: Ok I'll do my best to respond, please keep in mind that I'm not trying to be 'smart' or a jerk. You seem to have quite strong feelings about what the facts are. For me I only feel strongly that the 'facts' we're told are not correct and that investigation and analysis needs to be done rather than just accepting and moving on like none of it is a big deal.
All of that is just a laundry list of out of context anti-vax talking points
Have you considered that there is a pro-vax set of talking points? From my position that is what we were and continue to be bombarded with. Journalists are still writing opinion pieces on how we need to lock down earlier next time and organise vaccines earlier (because such a concept as treatment doesn't exist), and no-one seems to remember or realise that we already had a pandemic plan before covid 19 came along that was tossed to the side.
because a disturbingly large percentage of the world's right-leaning population takes Trump's rambling brain vomits seriously
Do you also think he told people to inject themselves with bleach? There's no cure for stage IV TDS which is an epidemic of its own. What I take from this is that you think if Trump says one thing, then the opposite must be true?
I was almost willing to run with your argument for a bit until you started down the Ivermectin rabbit hole, which has literally never been recommended as a treatment for COVID
No I don't believe it was ever recommended officially. The point is it was never even allowed for discussion so how could it ever get to the stage of being recommended. Are you aware that Ivermectin has also been studied recently as having anti cancer properties? Go and look it up. You won't hear 'A 9 News exclusive - the drug that could cure cancer' on the TV any time soon as again if it proves successful in treatment, it's off patent and not something that will generate lucrative profits. In fact it would likely cannibalise profits from proprietary treatments.
But "I was almost willing to run…" - what does that say about the principles you're taking in your argument? Because one thing I mention tickles your conspiracy spider sense that the rest is now invalidated? This isn't a court case where I've bore witness to something. Again, I'm not trying to say these individual points I'm making are interdependent, they are small parts that make a big problem.sweeping, speculative generalisations and entirely made up statistics…
Sorry to say this is quite an ironic point in your reply. You gave me 5 paragraphs of generalisations. Please let me know which statistics I invented, as these are going from memory but I didn't want to clog up the post with a dozen links like some 'nutter'.
the fact that some people who took it got better would be more impressive if most people who get COVID don't get better either way
To borrow from you, it sounds suspiciously like your personal gut feeling. See what I mean?
and then add in a dollop of the wisdom of hindsight
That would be the entire point of something like a royal commission would it not? If a nobody like me can see that there is something wrong with what happened in hindsight shouldn't we ought to try and learn why it went wrong? The truth shouldn't fear sunlight. If everything is as you think it is then that will surely come out?
The common thread in all of this conspiratorial thinking is the same flaw that is common to all good conspiracies
And to give the same take but from the other side - the common thread with people who are brain locked onto the official narrative of covid is the same - completely ignore anything to the contrary because the cognitive dissonance of admitting you're wrong is too high a price to pay. Imagine having to feel bad for the horrible behaviour exhibited in the last 4 years? But surely, where there's pro-vax smoke there is fire right?
Lee Harvey Oswald visited Cuban and Soviet embassies while he was in Mexico City, ergo, John F. Kennedy's assassination was a communist plot! I mean, nobody has any evidence of an actual plot, but he was in the building for half an hour, so, do your own research!
I already explained I'm not on the hunt for things to 'believe in'. But you really seem to know your stuff when it comes to this. Are you sure it's not you that goes down rabbit holes? Ask yourself what the meaning of the word conspiracy is. In popular culture and in the context of mainstream news it seems to be related to fiction and fantasy, but there is actually such thing as a real conspiracy. Again, I'm not making any accusations of people overtly conspiring in the case of covid, just that pharmaceutical companies are greedy, they have form when it comes to being litigated against for putting profits before safety, and that they are powerful and effective in their lobbying efforts, and combine that with our authoritarian actions and bad things then follow.
misunderstanding of basic pharmacology and epidemiology
Would you care to point out what my basic misunderstanding here is? You've made this claim so presumably you have some knowledge in the area. The sources that have helped to inform my view are doctors and scientists that were world renowned in their fields (vaccines, immunology, epidemiology) until they spoke out against what was happening. My experience is the typical pro-vaxxer will a) try to discredit someone who wants to argue against by saying they're not a doctor or scientist. Then b) if they are a doctor or scientist then they don't specialise in that particular field and so have no authority. And finally c) if they are qualified, then they must be crazy, lost the plot etc. and point to how 'unsuprisingly' that those people are now pariahs in their field and can no longer get papers published.In short the same 'flawed' thinking process you accuse me of could be applied exactly to your reply. Is this reply of yours your own conclusions, or taken from sites/people who 'debunk' conspiracy theories? Because my feeling is that what you've written is just a) labelling me in with a group of people and b) a bunch of sweeping generalisations that get routinely applied to said group of people to discredit, apply guilt by association and shut down conversation. Would it be fair to label you as a shill and pro big business and fascist because you agree with the official narrative? Or would that be counter productive to trying to have an unbiased opinion? I watch the news and read mainstream media regularly, along with 'independent' (or insert your favourite demeaning term for it) news sources. I even read the 'fact checks' (which is a whole other can of worms - 1984 wasn't meant to be a utopia novel) to try and get balance. Do you? It's useful to know all sides. From the content of what you've said it seems that your 'both sides' might be mainstream news and conspiracy debunking sites. Is that the case?
Never is the absolute best time to receive flu vaccine.
In WA, May, June (speaking to pharmacist it will be free then and this is OzBargain)
Thanks! Numbers are still low in WA anyway, according to local GP.
We should not be looking at national data here.Just one guy's personal observations. He sees a lot of flu cases when they are around, nursing homes etc.
I haven't had the flu shot in a while but I got really sick a couple of months ago when I was on holiday to QLD for a couple of days and it impacted me for a couple of weeks a bit too so I vowed to do everything I can to lower the likelihood of it reoccurring.
Plus my work does free shots, so it can't hurt to do it.
now, it takes some time to be effective
.