By Kathryn Doyle
(Reuters Health) – More than 40 percent of a sample of U.S. adults believe the myth that flu vaccines can give you the flu, and even correcting that misconception might not convince them to get the vaccine, a new survey suggests.
“It is absolutely biologically impossible to get the flu from the vaccine,” said Dr. Gregory A. Poland, a professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, who studies the immunogenetics of vaccine response.
He was not involved with the new study.
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It seems logical that dispelling this myth would lead to more people getting the shot, but it may not work that way in real life, Poland told Reuters Health by phone.
“Things that seem logical and intuitive can have perverse effects that we don’t always understand or expect,” he said.
The new results show that teaching patients about the safety and efficacy of the vaccine shouldn’t be ‘one size fits all,’ he said.
“I think we have to move toward a model where I as a physician have to change my style of educating based on my listening and understanding what your educational needs are,” he said.
In an online survey in 2012, 1,000 U.S. adults were asked how concerned they were about side effects from the influenza vaccine.
A quarter of people said they were extremely or very concerned.
Next, the 1,000 respondents were randomly divided into three groups. One group got information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website on the safety of the flu vaccine. The second group received information from the CDC on the danger of the flu itself. The third group did not have any information.
Then the respondents answered questions about whether or not one can get the flu from the vaccine, their belief in the safety of the vaccine, and their intent to get a flu shot in the coming year.
More than 40 percent of people believed the statement “the flu vaccine can give you the flu” was at least somewhat accurate, and four percent believed the vaccine was not at all safe, according to results in Vaccine.
In the group that read CDC information on the safety of the vaccine, fewer people believed it could give you the flu.
But the group that read about the dangers of the flu still had misperceptions about the flu vaccine, the authors found.
Overall, about a third of participants said they were very unlikely to get a flu shot in the coming year – and neither information source seemed to affect that intention.
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