[shark24]

(2011.Nov.23 07:15 PM)cipher Wrote:  As Dusti's post mentioned, the flu vaccine is made from inactive virus strains.

It can't give you the flu. What it can give you is some of the symptoms of having the flu, and those are caused by your body's immune system responding to the vaccine.

It's the same reason I can't usually tell if it's a cold or allergies which are affecting me, since the symptoms often present the same.

Another reason people usually complain that the vaccines don't work is they pick something like three flu strains that they think are most likely to hit you, and build the vaccine for those. There are way more strains than that, so all you have to do is contract one of those strains you haven't been vaccinated for, and end up feeling like the vaccine was worthless. What you don't know is how many times you came into contact with the ones you were vaccinated for, and thus protected from.

you might have to shorten that up a bit to explain it to a couple of the posters in this forum