Can Flu Shots Give You The Flu? Rutgers Doc Offers Tips, FAQ

NEWARK, NJ — Can flu shots give you the flu? Nope… but there are several reasons why you might think so, according to a professor at Rutgers University.

With flu season officially underway on the east coast, David Cennimo, an infectious disease expert and assistant professor of medicine and pediatrics at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School recently offered some information that can help people cope with the virus.

The full transcript of the video follows below.

Hi, my name is David Cennimo. I'm an assistant professor of medicine and pediatrics at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, and I'm an infectious disease doctor for adults and kids.

Flu season is here, so let's talk about how to avoid getting this nasty bug.

So, flu season is actually a pretty wide range, but in New Jersey, it tends to be the later winter, so December and January.

It starts earlier on the West Coast, moves East, but for us we like to think about it as a January bug.

Now, that's not to say that you can't contract the flu in October. So, that's one reason that we want to get everyone vaccinated as soon as possible.

Most commonly, we talk about sneezing, coughing, respiratory droplets. So, things that spray the virus in the air, but it's also spread on surfaces, and people forget that.

If you cough, if it's on your hands, you touch the door handle and then the next person coming through the door touches that handle, they can inoculate themselves with the virus. So, hand hygiene during flu season is really, really important.

Flu typically is a rapid onset, so people will tell you that they went to work feeling fine and they got sick, and they can tell you 1 p.m. I got sick. But it's rapid onset, fever, headache, muscle pains called myalgias, cough, sore throat.

You can have some nausea and vomiting, but I would say that the most classic finding that you're going to hear people talk about is they feel like they've been hit by a ton of bricks.

The flu shot cannot give you the flu.

All of the flu shots, meaning the injectable flus, are dead. So, there's nothing infectious in there.

Now, that's not to say that people don't have some symptoms after they get the shot, sometimes. That can happen for a few different reasons.

First, if you were already incubating the flu by the time you got the vaccine, it's not going to help you. And we know that the vaccine takes about 2 weeks to work in your system, which is why we want you to get vaccinated early, before flu is in your neighborhood.

You may have another virus. You may have a cold or something else and you're mistaking it for the flu.

Finally, you may have gone into the office to get the flu vaccine and there are already people sick there, so you could've caught it, and unfortunately, if you catch it at the same time that you get the vaccine, you're not going to be protected by the vaccine, from that strain of flu.

What most people feel is an immune reaction to the vaccine. So, the vaccine is stimulating your immune system, saying "look at this virus, or these viral particles, learn them, remember them, and react later." So, that process of learning can stimulate your immune system and you may feel tired, achy for a day. That's not getting sick that's actually, I think, a good sign because it's showing that it's really working.

And that's what a lot of people confuse with "the flu shot makes me sick."

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