The polio vaccine is also clearly more effective at limiting the disease than the flu or covid vaccines (granted that this is in part just the nature of the virus).
Having said that, as an asthmatic I've had the Flu vaccine every year for the last 20 or so years, and knock on wood haven't had Flu since. I also had the multivalent pneumonia vaccine a while ago, so fingers crossed!
My doctor friend doesn't get flu vaccine even when recommended, because, to quote her, "in my line of work, I was already exposed to everything ten times at least". She works as an ORL expert in a big hospital, so she is constantly staring down some sick throats.
Startup idea - vaccine delivery service. Pay a fee or subscription and someone comes to your house or workplace and jabs you with flu vaccine plus any travel shots required.
Not a slight against the flu shot, just a funny tidbit since it reminded me that the vaccine doesn't make me invincible from all similar disease.
"We identified a statistically significant increased risk of noninfluenza respiratory virus infection among TIV recipients (Table 3), including significant increases in the risk of rhinovirus and coxsackie/echovirus infection" [1]
That's one of the complications in assessing efficacy: if the benefit in flu vaccine is potentially quite modest (as determined by some long-running studies [2]), and it causes an increased risk of other noninfluenza respiratory viruses, then we need higher-quality, more detailed studies to understand what's happening.
But based on the discussion of the Cochrane review it seems unlikely. [3]
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3404712/
[2] https://www.cochrane.org/news/featured-review-three-updated-...
[3] https://community.cochrane.org/news/why-have-three-long-runn...