This article in the Scientific American talks about how the US Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) emphasizing and convincing vaccine skeptics that flu vaccine works in a way that often people don’t appreciate.

The agency said to have launched a “Wild to Mild” messaging campaign “to illustrate how a vaccine can tame a bout with the flu by reducing its strength from that of an elephant or a lion to that of a mouse or a kitten”.

Sarah Bauerle Bass, a social and behavioral scientist at Temple University, who said to focuses on health and risk communication, told Scientific American, “We tend to take kind of a black-and-white approach to vaccines of ‘if you get vaccinated, it will keep you from getting that particular disease. The pro is that it’s a very simple message; the con is that it doesn’t necessarily communicate the reality of vaccines, which is that sometimes you do get that disease even though you’re vaccinated.”

According to William Schaffner, a professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University, “the amount of protection a vaccine offers depends on the disease it targets. For some shots, such as those for measles and polio, the black-and-white approach is essentially true. If you received the standard vaccine regimen as a child, your odds of ever catching those particular diseases are tiny: around 1 percent for each. But flu doesn’t work the same way.”

The article explains “measles and polio are static viruses, whereas influenza mutates regularly, allowing it to evade our immune system even if it’s been trained to identify the pathogen via prior infection or vaccination. In addition, influenza is a family of viruses, and typically the flu vaccine administered in the U.S. targets only four strains. These strains are selected based on the ones that are circulating in the Southern Hemisphere more than six months before flu season begins in the North. Selecting which strains to target is a guessing game—one that scientists can’t always win.”

Erin Burns, associate director of communications for the influenza division at the CDC, quoted saying “During well-matched seasons, we see [risk reduction] numbers pretty consistently within the range of 40 to 60 percent among the vaccinated. I think the public perception, maybe, is that that is less than impressive.”

“The perceived low protection can cause people to hesitate about receiving the vaccine. There’s a very widely held perception that the flu vaccine doesn’t work. People think that if they get vaccinated, and then they get sick, the vaccine has failed.”

According to Burns, the ‘Wild and Mild’ campaign is reportedly designed to counter that idea “that the flu vaccine doesn’t work and present a more accurate understanding of the shot’s purpose”.

“We were realizing that we needed to reset those expectations. She isn’t concerned that advertising the fact that the flu vaccine doesn’t offer total protection could reduce uptake because the perception of its failure is already so widespread.”

“We can do a lot of good with this vaccine. We can turn wild to mild while we’re waiting for the perfect science to give us the perfect flu vaccine. It’s not here yet. Let’s do the best we can with what we have today,” says Prof. Schaffner.