"I had one mandatory flu shot in the military many years ago, got very sick with the only bad case of flu I have ever had and have managed to avoid that little bit of masochism ever since."
Interesting... I do not recall a shortage of flu shots last year, yet I do remember continuous updates of sections of the country having outbreaks... Will be interesting as the fall/winter season progresses to see the tracking of flu outbreaks..
They screwed up last year too, just in a different way. Every spring or summer the CDC brain trust - and I use that term loosely - gets together, looks over the incoming data, and decides which three strains of the flu are "most likely" to be the dominant strain(s) that coming fall and winter. Then they tell the only two drug companies allowed to make the vaccines to create shots to protect people against those three strains .Sometimes they're right, sometimes they're not. Last year they were dead wrong, and none of the three strains in the flu shots turned out to be the strain that spread around the world and made everybody sick.
And yet somehow, humanity survived. Imagine that.
In any case, flu outbreaks are inevitable every year no matter what. The whole country never gets vaccinated, so there's always a pool of many millions of Americans that remain completely susceptible to whichever strain is going around. Also, the flu vaccine is nowhere near perfect. In some people, it just never totally "takes," so you might end up with only partial immunity, where you get the flu anyway but it just doesn't last as long. Or you may be one of the unlucky ones for whom the vaccine doesn't take at all.
In the end, though, what the government is saying is pretty much correct. Unless you have a kid less than 2 or 3 years old, or you're over 65, or have a compromised immune system, just forget about it. If you're a hypochondriac, wash your hands more often and get one of those bottles of Purell at Wal-Mart to carry around. And if you are in one of those high-risk groups, stop acting like an idiot and waiting on line for six hours like you're going to die tomorrow without your shot. Flu season hasn't even started yet in most places. You'll have a chance to get your shot in some leisurely, rational fashion at some point in the next few weeks.