Flu shots are made up of what they think the next major strains will be, however they are wrong a majority of the time. Why do we still get them? Full disclosure, I still get them.
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They are not wrong most of the time as they have 4 strains in the shot and at least 1 of them is a major strain that year, they might not always pick the top 4 though.
But that doesn’t matter as the immune system does something really cool called [__affinity maturation__](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_maturation) where over time/exposure to a pathogen the immune system can get better at recognizing it. It’s a lot faster to slightly modify immunity from one flu strain to a slightly different one than it is to build it up from scratch. Not to mention there is usually some cross immunity between flu strains anyway.
Lastly, there is now some evidence that people that get the flu shot have lower rates of dementia than people that don’t. This could just be a coincidence, but considering flu can infect the brain and the vaccine makes flu illness less severe, regardless of the strain, this is plausible.
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