I had a thought this weekend about why people are having trouble giving their children the flu vaccine.
I talked to a number of my older female relatives at a simcha this weekend, women who had children in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. I asked them if they had any reticence to vaccinate their children back then, when vaccines weren’t nearly as good and harm-free as they are now.
All said they didn’t hesitate at all, because they knew what a scourge polio was, and the vaccine was regarded as nothing short of a miracle.
I think this is for several reasons. There was more trust in the government back then, and a much less cynical worship of medical practitioners.
So, I thought further. Maybe we don’t take flu so seriously because it is so commonplace. We say “I had the flu,” which usually doesn’t mean the flu, just a bad cold. We don’t think of it as a killer.
But the flu really is a reliable killer. Maybe not in huge numbers, and maybe not so dramatically, though in total it kills about 60,000 Americans per year. It does so undramatically and reliably when it rolls around every winter.
Does the ubiquity of flu make us complacent?
When a West Nile Virus or Eastern Equine Encephalitis occur, people run in panic to their doctors for vaccines? Why? because they’re rare and new, so rare that when someone does succumb, we hear about it on the news.
The flu is neither new or rare, but it dwarfs the death toll from West Nile or EEE. But we don’t hear about each flu death on the news, we just hear the numbers on the radio, and occassionally we lose someone close to us.