Yes,I know the vaccine can cause serious side effects. I just prefer to go with the odds:
A new report underscores what health professionals know but parents may not: The flu can be fatal to children, even healthy kids who don’t have other medical conditions.
Researchers with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 830 kids died from flu-related complications between October 2004 and September 2012, and most of those children had not gotten a flu vaccine. Pneumonia was the most commonly reported complication among the kids who died. Their median age was 7.
The report also shows that 43% of the kids who died from flu complications were otherwise healthy and didn’t have high-risk medical conditions such as asthma, diabetes, certain types of cancer, congenital heart defects or neurological disorders such as cerebral palsy or epilepsy. Children with those types of health problems are at a greater risk of dying from flu complications.
The CDC “recommends that all children 6 months or older get the flu vaccine every year, and this report shows that any child can be at risk for severe complications from influenza,” says the report’s lead author, Karen Wong, a CDC medical officer. These findings reinforce that “prevention is the best strategy, and the best strategy we have is vaccination,” she says.
