In university I was working as a security guard on the night shift listening to "Coast to Coast AM with George Norry" (which is a show that is almost exclusively filled with people’s personal delusions, but is strangely entertaining at 2am) and one of the shows was on the risks of immunization. At the time I was dating a girl in Biological Science who had just completed a course on immunology and I asked her about a bunch of the risks presented in the show.
The thing that surprised me the most was that every claim made in the show was accurate. Every time you get vaccinated you’re (essentially) treating your immune system to over-react to something that doesn’t present any risk, and with every vaccine there is a chance that the immune system will target cells within your body and attack them for no particular reason which leads to the most serious side-effects (like the one in the story); at the same time, being that allergies are also an immune reaction to something that is not really a risk there is evidence to support a link over-immunization with more allergies.
Now, I want to be clear, I think immunization is a great way to protect people against diseases when there is a high risk of them catching it and it is severe enough to justify the immunization. The question that should be asked that won’t be (by most people) is why would you give a (very) healthy 20 something woman a flu-shot?
