I'm going to make the Covid / Flu comparison...

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

51. I and you need to do a bit more research.

I'd come across this fact about the influenza vaccine being better if taken every other year, and then I attended a talk by a scientist from LANL (Los Alamos National Labs, and notice I don't expect everyone to know the abbreviation) who talked in great detail about influenza and the vaccine, and stressed that very point.

I happen to be a huge proponent of natural immunity, meaning people get exposed to stuff, get infected, get over it, and are now immune. That's intended to be a very general statement, but is very important. Here's the essential problem. People don't fully understand how the immune system works. It's like this. We're programmed, meaning evolved, to be subjected to a whole lot of immune challenges in the early years of our lives, about the first 15 or 20 years, and if we survive, we're good to go for the next fifty years. After which, we slowly succumb to whatever.

I grew up in an environment where I was exposed to lots of other kids, got sick a lot when I was young. I lived in a low income housing development from age 2 to 7, was exposed to everything. Got all the childhood diseases -- this was in the 1950s long before the current vaccines for such things. I recall missing a lot of school in my kindergarten year, and almost nothing after that. Lucky me.

In the modern world, people have been saved from all sorts of things. They've survived medical/immune/whatever challenges thanks to modern medicine. You and I are not going through life with the horrific scars of smallpox thanks to smallpox vaccination and the total eradication of that disease. Nor do I expect to deal with shingles in the remainder of my life (I'm 72, and yes, I did get chicken pox early in life, meaning I'm at risk for shingles) since I did get the most recent vaccine for it. Eventually, shingles will go away thanks to the chicken pox vaccine. Hooray!

So get an influenza vaccine, every other year is best. Get the Covid19 vaccine. And so on. But understand that if you try to protect yourself from any and all illness, you will eventually be like the boy in the bubble, and have no immune protection of any kind.

In the very long run, we all die.