I got one last Friday, but after listening to this Lew Rockwell podcast, reading this Lew Rockwell article and after having experienced some mildly freaky shit with my liver* after the flu shot, I'm not so sure anymore. Should probably start taking vitamin D.


* I had a liver transplant when I was a kid. A couple of hours after last week's flu shot I started to feel a slight pain in my liver that lasted for a couple of hours. Probably the flu shot triggered immune system responses that in turn trigger some sort of rejection process, or possibly some freakier shit relating to the chemicals in the flu shot caused it.

Liver transplant? Wow! Are you on anti-rejection drugs?

yeah, one drug, but only a very minor dosage.

I avoid the flu shot, and the reason is a disease my dad got that is connected to flu shots (though tenuously) called Guillain-Barré Syndrome, or GBS. Here's a couple of links:

(general info related to GBS and flu shots)
http://www.medpagetoday.com/Pulmonary/URIstheFlu/4510

(symptoms)
http://www.neurologychannel.com/guillain/index.shtml

GBS is very rare, but it can be triggered by a flu shot, in fact the risk is almost 50% greater after the injection, though the general risk is still very low, like one in a million.

My father had the flu shot that year and he wasn't otherwise sick. If you begin to have any of the specific symptoms, the earlier a diagnosis is made, the better (it is easy to rule out, too), because it is one of the few auto-immune diseases that responds well to early treatment, and can be reversed without significant damage with steroid drugs. My dad's got so bad he was paralyzed from the legs down and had to have his blood run through a machine to extract white blood cells in hopes it would slow the attack on his nerves. He still walks funny because he can't feel the bottom of his feet.

Anyway, there's no way to know for sure what caused it, but I just wanted to follow up since I meant to tell you why I don't get the shot myself, and I thought it was especially relevant given your liver/immune system status. Probably, the immuno-suppressants would help prevent GBS from being triggered, since it a hyper-immune response. Auto-immune diseases are treated with those same type of drugs anyway, so you're sort of taking the cure before the disease. Anyway, just an FYI.