No, the Flu Shot Will Not Make You Spread the Flu

(WASHINGTON) — Getting the flu shot won’t make you spread the disease more, doesn’t weaken your immune system but it does offer some protection from getting infected, despite misleading claims on social media. A post on a site called thewilddoc claimed that being vaccinated does more harm than good, citing a January peer-reviewed study. But one of the main authors of that study called the post “untrue” and “misleading,” not accurately interpreting the study. In January, Dr. Donald Milton and a team of researchers at the University of Maryland published a study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about how the influenza virus spreads not just in coughs, but also in the breath of 142 flu-struck people. Of those people with flu, only 22 percent had gotten vaccinated that year, but among those who had been vaccinated they shed six times more tiny aerosols of the flu. The social media post than took that study and made four claims, all of which Milton said were untrue or misleading. The biggest claim from the posting — “individuals who receive the flu vaccine are placing others around them at greater risk than the unvaccinated” — is wrong, according to Milton, who has a medical degree and doctorate in public health. “Unvaccinated people are more likely to get the flu and transmit it to other people because they shed lots of virus into the nasal secretions into the air,” he wro...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized APH flu healthytime onetime Source Type: news