Gratitude Monday: not going viral

Here’s what I’m grateful for today: I got my flu shot last week. Even with the lousiest health insurance it’s possible to pay huge premiums for, they covered the shot 100%. Because even Anthem knows that it’s cheaper for them to pay for the shot than it is to pay for prescriptions and doctor visits—possibly even a stay in hospital—when you come down with this season’s viral strain.

I get a shot every year because, as a New Military historian focused on 20^th Century conflicts, from the moment I understood the nature of influenza, I’ve been grateful that in the absence of a cure, we at least have vaccines that mitigate its effects.

More people died in the 1918-19 global flu pandemic than had been killed in four years of total war. The death toll figures range from 50 to 100 million. Dead. (Combat-related deaths came to approximately 37 million.) Since that time, scientists still don’t know how to really treat it—aside from rest, fluids and analgesics for the aches. So we’re at risk just as people were 95 years ago.

And it’s a clever bugger, flu—every year the virus mutates so that having had a previous strain doesn’t immunize you against this year’s. You have to face every one as a new enemy.

At least in the US this is generally understood—you know that when stingy insurance companies foot the bill for the vaccine, they’ve done the cost-benefit analysis and decided that this is still the cheapest way of managing health care.

When I moved to the UK, I visited my (NHS) GP around September and mentioned that as flu season was approaching, I’d better get a shot. She sat back and informed me that, since I wasn’t in a risk group (very old, very young or suffering from respiratory ailments), it wasn’t available to me. The government only ensured the production of enough vaccine to serve those “at-risk” categories.

So, on my annual trip home, I got the shot from my US internist, and then was fascinated to follow continuous news stories from November through about February, about how NHS hospitals were bursting at the seams from admitting flu patients (as in gurneys-in-corridors full), and the appalling numbers of deaths from the virus.

There was no outcry, no outrage; I was amazed. Her Majesty’s Government could run the same risk-benefit analysis as Anthem (and do it every year) and decide that a few scores of thousands hospitalized (on the taxpayers’ pounds) and a few tens of thousands dead was a better outcome than buying enough vaccine and running an awareness campaign to prevent pandemics.

So, with my historian’s perspective, and my experience of how others approach it, I’m grateful that this year’s flu vaccine has been produced to different specs than in the UK, and that even my crappy insurance company will pay for it.