ArteMie's journey with Stelera

[Caroline]

I had the flu jab for the first time ever in the autumn, and I’ve just had such a bad cough with high temperature, it may well have been flu. It went on for ages and I don’t even remember a couple of the days!

Obviously the jab didn’t cause it. But I never get ill like this, even on methotrexate a cold would only be a couple of days and light sniffles. Could it be that the flu jab forces your body to be busy making antibodies to it, and therefore fail to successfully fight off other viruses that come along? How long after the jab are you actually making the antibodies? Probably only as long as flu would last.

Hi TL,

As far as I know, after the flu-jab, your body starts to make anti-bodies immediately so within two weeks you are protected against the types of flu that were in the injection.
That does not mean that you will be completely immune if you get one of those flu's, but the effects will be much less. You still can be ill.
But in the flu-jab they cannot put protection for every flu-virus, they only can do that for e.g. the 5 most expected. This year the flu that came over the Netherlands, probably the same as  yours, was NOT in the flu-jab. So there was no protection against this variant at all.
In NL this led to a real flu epidemic, lots of casualties with the elderly. One of the extra risks was getting pneumonia.