More cookies?

Let's say you only want one box of Girl Scout cookies, when a Girl Scout comes to your door. She offers to sell you 5 boxes. You tell her you will purchase one box. She says 'how about 3?'. You concede, because it's not the 5 boxes she was expecting to sell you.

It was a simple marketing tactic that even a child can perform. She caused you to purchase 3 times the amount that you wanted to buy in the first place. Your motivation? Perhaps guilt, a sense of 'doing the right thing', or just wanting to get this transaction over with. There are many possible reasons.
Her motivation? To sell as many cookies as possible.

The media has always pushed getting your flu shot every year. This year, pharmaceutical companies expect to triple their sales (by a very conservative estimate) of 'pandemic' flu shots for the Swine Flu. (see http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TRAVEL/07/22/swine.flu.drugs/index.html )

Whether someone gets these shots or not is a personal decision. Smart marketing tends to get on the personal level though. Some people are great supporters of vaccines, and others are quite the opposite. Say you're an average person who got all your shots as a kid, and would get the flu shot if something you wanted to be a part of (a new job perhaps) required it. You're not the type though, to run out to get an unrequired shot on your own.

The media/government/pharmaceutical companies work together to 'educate' us as to what's available to 'protect' yourself. In effect, it's someone coming to your door offering to sell you this experimental*** vaccine for each member of your family. Children should get two, one in each arm. Also, they offer the regular vaccine that you, your spouse and kids should get as well for the 'normal' flu that actually kills more people than the pandemic flu.

'Whoa, that's alot of shots' you may say. "I don't trust all that N1H1 stuff, I'll just take the normal flu shot, and whatever is mandated for the kids, so they don't get kicked out of school.''
Sound's reasonable.
Ask yourself, if you never heard of N1H1, and did not have to worry about required shots for school, would you be even getting that 'reasonable' amount of vaccinations? With that decision you made, you probably purchased 3 times or more shots than you would have not being exposed to marketing. Isn't that much the same as a girl scout overshooting how many boxes of cookies you should buy?

When our friends or people we know say something about our personal health care decisions, it's easier to get our back up about it. This is justified, because this is a personal decision . It's generally not the business of anyone else.
However, we cannot allow clever (or even basic) marketing make this decision for us. Just because it's not a person telling you what you should do, does not mean it's not overstepping it's proper place.

Please, do research on how the immune system works. Look at test results from an actual study, not just the cliff notes from a magazine article. Learn about the risks of dying, and treatment for someone who actually contracts the disease.

We all need to avoid the tendency to make this decision the same way we make the decision to buy a $5 foot-long, or insurance from a lizard. It's more important than making a consumer purchase.

*** The N1H1 vaccine has been tested on many volunteers. However, no one can know the long term affects of this, since it's a new shot. It would be very difficult, if not impossible, to know if any vaccination is the cause of a chronic disease that took years to develop in a person's system.