I'm on the same boat of for children it can be more serious, and they are crammed into a building, close quarters with 20-30 others. They are susceptible. You have to weigh the option of side effect versus the actual virus. If you can catch free flu shots for your family through work or even $5-10 flu shots at a clinic, I think it's worth it. A bad bout of flu in a young child can land them in the hospital, and we all know how ridiculous that price tag gets. Again that is only my opinion and I won't tell a parent what to choose for their own child.
it doesn’t make sense to me to purposely infect someone poison in order to help them build up an tolerance to it.
As for that, I agree it does "sound" messed up, but it is pretty much how vaccines work. A little more clinical description is:
The immune system recognizes vaccine agents as foreign, destroys them, and 'remembers' them. When the virulent version of an agent comes along the body recognises the protein coat on the virus, and thus is prepared to respond, by (1) neutralizing the target agent before it can enter cells, and (2) by recognizing and destroying infected cells before that agent can multiply to vast numbers.
Vaccines have contributed to the eradication of smallpox, one of the most contagious and deadly diseases known to man. Other diseases such as rubella, polio, measles, mumps, chickenpox, and typhoid are nowhere near as common as they were a hundred years ago. As long as the vast majority of people are vaccinated, it is much more difficult for an outbreak of disease to occur, let alone spread. This effect is called herd immunity. Polio, which is transmitted only between humans, is targeted by an extensive eradication campaign that has seen endemic polio restricted to only parts of four countries.[1] The difficulty of reaching all children as well as cultural misunderstandings, however, have caused the anticipated eradication date to be missed several times.
Side story:
I used to be super allergic to poison ivy when I was a kid. That sucks as a kid in the south, where all outdoor areas including the city park were tree lined and passing within feet of it would infect me. In 6th grade, I caught a bout so bad that it put me in the hospital for a week, by basically having my face and neck swell so bad, the doctor thought it might squeeze my larynx shut. Anyway, when I came out of the hospital, he let me me and my parents know there were clinical trials going in for a vaccine that showed tremendous progress in building immunity to the poison. At the time of him explaining it I remember thinking "there is poison ivy in that needle???" and he explained it was a dead or "inactive" version of the poison and gave the description from above.
My parents and I agreed, and on every Tuesday morning for 6-12 months we stopped in the doctor's office, I got a shot in the ass then went to school, and it was all paid for by the trials. We were told they were hoping I'd be affected by poison ivy about 70% less than before. Well it turned out better than that. For all intensive purposes, I'm almost immune to poison ivy today. When burning all the trees in a pasture on farm property my family owns, my brother and myself handled logs with poison ivy on them and burned them, with the poison in the smoke (unknowingly), and he got it bad, and I got nothing. In fact, I've never gotten poison ivy again since those shots in 1988.
