Flu shots, Follow-up

Frequent commenter AllisaSandersonPhoto wrote:

...it gets my back up when the government pushes something so insistently. it would be so easy for someone (government or not) to put all sorts of stuff into the flu shot that the majority of the population will willingly get. Perhaps I'm too cynical. maybe I'm just crazy. lol

No, I don't think you are the least bit cynical or crazy.

There have been reports of healthcare providers exposing patients to contagious diseases.  Sometimes through sloth or apathy.  Sometimes through malice.

Many of us have heard claims that some patients who are HIV positive deliberately expose others.  These claims started with "Patient Zero" and the claim keeps popping up.

A paper from 2010 suggests that "the severely mentally ill" are more likely to engage in activities that can lead to HIV (and Hepatitis) infections.  Those same psychotic people are also more likely to deliberately contaminate a vaccine than a "sane" person, and no contaminant is more accessible to a person than their own body fluids and tissue.

The paper goes on to estimate that HIV patients have a 0.5%-to-15% (1-in-200 to 1-in-7, a huge range) rate of "new onset psychosis..." sometime after becoming "HIV-seropositive".  So the risk is not just from people with severe mental illness getting AIDS, it is from people who are HIV positive becoming crazy due to the progression of their disease.

The impact of HIV on mental processes is common enough that it has been named:  "AIDS dementia complex" and there is an extensive Wikipedia article on its manifestations. And before the patient has full-blown dementia the patient is said to have "mild neurocognitive disorder" and apathy is one of the behavioral symptoms.

Anger is one of the Kübler-Ross stages of grieving.  The anger is often directed at folks who are not dying of AIDS.  If "rebellion" was one of the motives for engaging in the original high-risk activity, then who better to target than the room full of compliant folks lined up to get their risk-mitigating vaccination.  The final act of rebellion, making a risk-adverse behavior (a vaccination) the pathway to death.  In a very dark and twisted way, there is no better way to "stick it" to the man....and his wife and kids.

Are you crazy-cynical for not wanting a vaccine?  Heck no.  I think you have been reading the same articles and hearing the same things I have. You look at that 0.5cc of murky liquid and think, "How can I know what is really in that...."  You have to go with your gut on this one.  I have great faith in "Spidy senses" (a Spiderman allusion) for things like this.  How could you live with yourself if your Spidy senses were right but you over-rode them only to find you and/or your kids HIV positive?