Can the flu vaccine kill you?

The main concern in this video is that the father was hospitalized with neurological issues following a flu vaccine, not with lung cancer. However, lung cancer can cause neurological issues due to brain metastases, leptomeningeal metastases, epidural spinal cord compression, cerebrovascular events, radiation-related complications, and neurologic complications associated with systemic therapies.

The National Academy of Science looked into the flu vaccine and neurological side effects and found that in 1976, the flu vaccine was linked to Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS). However, they didn’t find any connection between the vaccine and MS relapses.

They also didn’t find evidence that the flu vaccine causes nerve problems in young children. GBS is a severe condition, but it’s rare, and in 1976, less than 6 out of a million people who got the vaccine had it. On the other hand, the flu causes an average of 13.8 deaths per 100,000 people each year (36,000 deaths, mostly in people 65 and older), and 49 out of 100,000 people end up in the hospital with pneumonia and the flu (114,000 hospitalizations). So, while we need to be careful about vaccine risks, we also need to remember how much worse the flu itself can be.

The biggest takeaway from this video is that a person’s perceptions of their loved one’s medical journey is hard to decipher. Losing a parent is devastating, and untangling a medical history from those emotions as an outside to determine anything about cause of death is impossible. So we look to the science, and the science points to the flu vaccine as being worth a shot.