Why Less People Are Getting the Flu Shot

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Transcript

00:00It's the perfect time for you to get your flu shot. We are seeing a drop-off in the number of

00:04people, especially vulnerable groups, children, pregnant women, last year even adults over the

00:09age of 65 who are the ones who are most likely to be hospitalized and die from the flu. So

00:13that's pretty scary. Really the best thing all of us can do is to get our flu shots. You know,

00:18they're not perfect, you might still get the flu, but it really improves your chances of not having

00:23any sort of serious outcomes. I think a lot of people aren't getting their flu shots because,

00:27well, there's two reasons. One, everyone's always been kind of skeptical of the flu shot. And you

00:33know, I think many of us have gotten the flu shot and gotten the flu anyway, and that creates a

00:37perception it doesn't work. Actually, what it's doing is making your infection worse. So it's

00:43possible that you could have gotten the flu and it would have been much worse if you hadn't gotten

00:46your flu shot. So I think get your shot. Two, obviously coming out of the pandemic, there's so

00:50much hesitancy around vaccines and misinformation around vaccines in general that people are

00:55questioning all of it. And I think that's just leading to a lower uptake overall. You know,

01:03we're seeing it with flu, we're seeing it with routine childhood vaccines, we're certainly seeing

01:06it with the COVID vaccine. But it really can save lives. And it really can make it so that this,

01:13the overall burden of infection in the US is lower if we're all kind of cocooning each other.