Article written by Michael Chavez in the style of the Lehigh Lookaway
There are three certainties in life…
- Death
- Annual Tuition Raises from Lehigh
- 90% of Lehigh’s Campus deleted the emails about free flu vaccines on campus
With the Covid pandemic now in the rear-view mirror for most college students, many of you are surely fed up with getting vaccinated time and time again. With the first “normal” year of Lehigh University life in seemingly decades, most students are just hoping to wipe all talk of pandemics, mask usage, and vaccines from their memories like that one time you slipped and fell carrying your food in Rathbone. However, just like figuring out how to use ChatGPT without getting caught or how to convince your professor that you were sick when you missed class without a doctor’s note, getting vaccinated for the flu should be of great importance for all students.
Much like the CHEM30 exams, the flu has been negatively impacting masses of people for years. The pandemic potential of the flu has been around even longer than Christmas-Saucon. The flu has impacted humankind since the 1500s, and unlike most of this post, the flu is no laughing matter. The Spanish flu in 1918 caused an estimated 21 million deaths worldwide, triple that of current COVID-19 global estimations.
Truthfully told the flu, unlike the annual urge of every Lehigh Student to drop out of college when finals roll around, does not cause a pandemic annually. Similar to passing all of your classes, for a true pandemic to occur, there must be a perfect storm. There has to be a strain of influenza that is transmissible enough to move from host to host faster than individuals can recover and even faster than your Orgo professor writing an F on your exam. Transmission must occur at temperatures where the virus can survive and the strain must also be able to beat the response of your host immune system similar to beating Turnitin on your last paper.
One of the most dangerous ways that influenza can infect humans and cause a pandemic is due to strains jumping over from other species like birds and pigs. Much like how you shouldn’t touch the campus squirrel foaming from its mouth, interactions with common birds and pigs could lead to dangerous flu infections that your immune system would be ill-equipped to fight. This is due to the ability of influenza to change over time from mutations inside of animal species, becoming more infectious and causing more severe infections. It can then jump over to humans when certain shifts occur in its composition. Such an event occurred in 2009 with the swine flu crossed over from pigs and killed over 200,000 people in the first year of its outbreak.
Granted, the students reading this are most likely asking themselves, how does this honestly affect me? I’m young enough that I won’t die from the flu, why do I need to get vaccinated? So, what if Grandma gets sick, she can just go to the doctor, I can’t miss my Halloween party on Saturday! Sure, perhaps Lehigh students do have stronger immune systems than the general public, I mean have you seen the ice cream station at Rathbone? More students dip their hands in the ice cream than in the “punch” served at “off-campus social events”.
This would be true but the flu evolves at a rate that even the immune system of a Lehigh student cannot keep up with. The flu mutates rapidly, similar to headlines surrounding the constant emergence of new COVID-19 strains. This rapid evolution allows for the flu to infect people at a rapid rate as new strains can outcompete with host immune systems, even those that have been recently infected.
Now… some of you may be thinking, so what if I get the flu? I’ll just recover within days and I’ll be fine to keep going out to “social gatherings” (socially distanced of course). Part of what makes the flu so unique and dangerous is that multiple strains of the flu can infect someone at one time much like getting hammered by three different exams from your three hardest courses in the same week. While all the strains are in a host, they can essentially combine and mix to create new strains that are even more infectious and deadly. So no, purposefully infecting yourself to get it over with is not a great excuse to avoid vaccination.
But what about the dangers of getting vaccinated, aren’t these new-fangled vaccines getting rushed to market quickly with zero research, and how do we know what’s in them? The truth is vaccines for the flu have been in constant development since the thirties! Unlike the “homemade turkey burgers” at Rathbone, we know what’s in them and what they do.
In the thirties (around the same time Lehigh first made its promise to knock down Trembley), scientists grew up influenza in hen eggs and then created a vaccine from an inactivated influenza strain from a mouse lung. Since then, the vaccine has evolved along with the flu. We now have rigorously tested and safe quadrivalent vaccines that protect against two different Influenza A and two Influenza B strains, allowing for greater protection against new strains.
At this point, most students who have lost most of their attention span due to constant scrolling on TikTok, have probably stopped reading. For those of you who have made it this far, we have reached the SparkNotes section of the post. The bottom line is vaccination is important.
As our population grows faster than Lehigh after increasing the acceptance rate, there is an everincreasing number of susceptible individuals who have not been exposed to the flu who aid in its transmission. With an increasing population, the density of people living in highly populated areas will continue to rise and with it comes increased transmission of the flu. As with a higher population density, similar to that of a Rathbone line after the closure of the UC, those who are infected with the flu will have increased contact with those who are not sick and susceptible to infection. This will increase the risk of an epidemic and even worse, a pandemic.
Thus, getting vaccinated is a great way to prevent future outbreaks. Is there a vaccine that is 100% effective? No, but it is our best and most researched way to prevent another pandemic. Heed the warning of your overprotective mother and consider scheduling a vaccination today for the flu.
References
Barberis, I et al. “History and evolution of influenza control through vaccination: from the first monovalent vaccine to universal vaccines.” Journal of preventive medicine and Hygiene vol. 57,3 (2016): E115-E120. Accessed 22 February 2023.
Earn, David J.D., et al. “Ecology and evolution of the flu.” Science Direct (2002), https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169534702025028. Accessed 22 February 2023.
Gass Jr, Jonathon D., et al. “Global dissemination of Influenza A virus is driven by wild bird migration through arctic and subarctic zones.” Molecular Ecology 32.1 (2023): 198-213. Accessed 15 March 2023.