The Voices section is a place for physicians, staff and community leaders to share their perspectives on all things healthcare. Dr. Bora Timkin joined Valley Children’s Medical Group in 2022 and works as a pediatric hospitalist at Bakersfield Memorial Hospital.
BAKERSFIELD, Calif. – On average, tens of thousands of people die from influenza every year in the United States, including hundreds of children. The children most at risk are those less than 6 months of age, as their immune systems and lungs are easily overwhelmed. This is all from an infection that is preventable with a widely available vaccine.
Yet as a country, our vaccination rates are rather abysmal, typically hovering around the low 40% range. The current influenza season (2025-2026) has seen an even worse vaccination rate when compared to this time last year. This raises the question: Why do most of us not get the vaccine?
The answer to this question isn’t simple. Working in healthcare, I hear many reasons why people elect not to get the influenza vaccine for themselves or their families. Some people are unaware of the deadliness of influenza. In addition to the many killed in the United States, so too are hundreds of thousands worldwide annually. Unlike other common causes of death, such as heart attack or stroke, we have a direct way to prevent people from dying. The influenza vaccine causes a significant and provable reduction in risk of death from the flu.
Many young, healthy adults may chance the lower risk of dying from the flu and play the odds by not getting the vaccine. In getting sick, they can spread it to vulnerable friends and family members unable to get the vaccine, either due to age or an underlying medical condition.
While most people who catch the virus tough out a few days of fatigue, body aches, sneezing and cough, there is still the risk of more serious complications. Pneumonia is by far the most common complication (either from the virus or from opportunistic bacteria that swoop in afterward), which can also trigger an asthma attack in those predisposed. Other complications include inflammation of the heart (called myocarditis) or inflammation and breakdown of the muscles (called rhabdomyolysis), which can cause kidney and liver failure.
The influenza virus does not spare the brain either, as it can be a trigger for seizures or stroke. The vast majority of patients (who are eligible for the vaccine) I admit to the hospital nowadays because of an influenza infection are unvaccinated. Of this set of patients, they experience the lion’s share of serious complications from influenza.
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As an example of a horrific complication from influenza, a 4-year-old patient I took care of in residency caught the flu while unvaccinated and subsequently developed scarring in a part of his brain called the temporal lobe. This led to seizures that were followed by incontinence and difficulty speaking. He left the hospital in diapers after previously being fully potty trained.
There are other concerns shared by people, including the tedium of yearly vaccines, the perception of getting sick from the vaccine itself and the safety of its components. Yearly vaccination is based on how the influenza virus works. It shifts the external pieces of itself recognizable to vaccines from year to year. This makes it challenging for vaccine developers to hone in on which variations of the virus will circulate, something that has to be decided many months in advance.
Despite the frequency with which we may receive the flu vaccine, it is a highly safe vaccine made of just a few ingredients that our bodies are more than capable of tolerating and metabolizing.
Because of the way the most common version of the vaccine is made, the virus is in a killed state, meaning there is no way to actually get the flu illness from the vaccine. Anytime someone has gotten sick after receiving the vaccine, they were likely exposed to one of the many viruses that circulate around the same time, such as rhinovirus or RSV.
There are many reasons why people choose not to get the influenza vaccine, but I hope I have addressed most. I recommend the flu vaccine for everyone who is able to get one. We can all do our part to prevent ourselves from getting sick, but also to protect those close to us and our community.
