I keep hearing I should get a flu shot to help prevent bird flu — but I thought flu shots only prevented illness from the particular strains the shot was designed for. Does getting a traditional flu shot do anything to prevent bird flu transmission?
It doesn’t directly but it can protect you from also being infected with human flu at the same time. That could easily turn into the patient zero scenario if the virii exchange genes, so it is still important to prevent/mitigate from happening.
For those (like me) who aren’t familiar with virus genetics, this is called recombination. Yes, it is possible between influenza and bird flu because they are the same virus type.
And to further drive it home, that’s how we got SARS (civets), MERS (camels), and COVID (bats/pangolins/unknown).
So get the damn flu shot. The new cell-based vaccines are much more likely to match the actively circulating strains than the older egg-based ones (due to so-called egg adaptation).
We nearly had a patient zero in Louisiana already, and their case was only an H5 mutation (not recombination from human strains). https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/spotlights/h5n1-response-12232024.html
H5 is widespread in wild birds, and it is spreading to cats. It is only a matter of time.
Also, the flu shot is fucking easy. You won’t feel a thing. The needle is tiny so you don’t feel a thing, maybe a slight pinch but once it’s past the skin it’s painless. The most common side effect is a sore arm for a day, but no worse than you get from a workout, and if it’s bad just take some Tylenol or weed.
Next time you’re at the pharmacy, just get it.
gonna confess I was high on edibles when I got my recent covid and flu shot😂
Totally worth it as the rest of my family got sick while I was working doing fine
Seasonal flu shots won’t protect you from bird flu.
I think seasonal flu shots also now contain strains of H1N1 (swine flu), but not this latest bird flu.Getting it might still help your odds against bird flu, even if only by lowering your chances of ever catching both at the same time.
Simultaneous infection isn’t gonna be fun.You getting a seasonal flu shot might also help the population in more roundabout way.
If less people need care for seasonal flu complications, health services will be less overloaded and more available to eventual bird flu patients if a bird flu pandemic did break out.The current flu shot is almost certainly not effective against the current HPAI A(H5N1) strain that is in the news and making life hard for dairy and poultry farms. There likely won’t be a vaccine developed for it unless it mutates to become human-to-human transmissible. Currently, people can only contract it from exposure to sick animals or their environment. As long as you avoid contact with sick birds or cattle (or their bodily fluids or feces) you should be safe from contracting it… unless it mutates.
It has also killed at least one cat who had eaten infected chicken:
It’s a whole different and horrific issue for cats. It’s also killed at least two whose owners them raw milk. It’s apparently about 67% lethal for cats.
That poses an even greater risk as the flu season continues. In someone infected with both H5N1 and the seasonal flu, the viruses might swap genes, potentially making the bird flu capable of spreading between people as efficiently as the seasonal flu does.
Getting all possible vaccines has a high potential to indirectly help in that: you become less likely to die or encounter serious ailments if you happen to get infected from the bird flu and any other endemic diseases such as covid, influenza, etc.
In games for example getting both paralyzed and poisoned means your chances of dying or having permanent long-term debuffs is more likely than if you had poison and/or paralysis immunity.
Only if it’s administered by a bird
As far as I understand, a flu shot only offers protection for the strains it was designed to target. I don’t honestly know if they would offer protection from bird flu. I highly doubt it but I’m not a vaccine expert.
