Get a flu shot—not for yourself, but for your community.

I stopped making excuses for skipping my annual flu shot. We all should.

Good afternoon. 

This is Sara Rubin writing today, with a confession: For years, I did not get a flu shot. I thought I didn’t need one because I wasn’t in a high-risk category for complications from the flu, and in the occasional years I did get the flu, I was better within a week. 

It was not until I started to learn about the basic principles of public health that I realized it really wasn’t about me and whether I cared or not about getting the flu. It’s about protecting complete strangers, the people you pass at the grocery store or the post office, who may be exposed to the flu and potentially suffer greatly or even die. To be the vector that unknowingly kills people because it was inconvenient to get a flu vaccine or because I felt like I’d fight it off with no problem was exactly the problem. It wasn’t about me—it was about a moral expectation in society that I would step up to do a minor thing to keep other people safer. 

Once you buy into the principle, it makes other public health asks, like wearing masks in public, a lot easier to handle. It’s a simple formula: A small burden for a person who is well can save other people’s lives. Why wouldn’t we all do that?

There are lots of reasons that get bandied about. For a bunch of years, mine was uninformed selfishness. Some years, my excuse has been inconvenience. But this week, I got a flu shot in a half-hour stop at a pharmacy, for free. 

I was inspired by staff writer Pam Marino’s reporting on the importance of flu shots this season. Even though it seems we are avoiding exposure to viruses like never before—as we abide by SIP principles, wear masks and wash our hands relentlessly due to the Covid-19 pandemic—it’s again not about me, it’s about protecting other people. 

“If we keep a large number of the population protected, we will keep the flu out of our community,” Dr. Martha Blum, an infectious disease specialist at Montage, told Marino. “To really be effective, to protect family, friends and neighbors, it will protect the whole community if we continue to get the flu vaccine.”

There aren’t that many opportunities for us to make life and death decisions like this. And when those opportunities do come along, they are often made in moments of crisis. When you have the chance to make such a decision as easily as running an errand, why wouldn’t you? 

-Sara Rubin, editor, sara@mcweekly.com