Flu Shot
Flu Shot
[Megan is walking with bother her hands held up in fists. She talks to Cueball who replies to her from off-panel. His presence is revealed in the second panel.] Megan: Yesss, I got my flu shot. Cueball (off-panel): Nice! I got mine a few weeks ago. Cueball (off-panel): Immunity buddies!
[Megan spreading her arms wide in front of Cueball.] Megan: Now I can finally get bitten by all the bats I want! Cueball: No, that's rabies, that's not what-
[Closeup of Megan's head, with Cueball's reply coming from off-panel.] Megan: I'll be able to roll and play in the poison ivy without a care in the world! Cueball (off-panel): Why would you do that even if the shot did -
[In a frame-less panel Megan is flexing her arms holding her fists up, she has turned partly away from Cueball who looks at her.] Megan: No more slathering on sunscreen. No more rushing for antivenom after a snakebite. And now I can stop wasting time boiling contaminated water before drinking it!
[Megan is running away from Cueball, while she is holding one arm up, her hand making the like symbol with a thumbs up.] Megan: Gonna click on every URL in every email I get, even the ones with IP addresses and weird Unicode in them! Cueball: You know what, sure, go for it.

In this comic, Megan tells Cueball that she got a flu shot , which is a vaccine commonly prescribed in the winter months to prevent getting the common flu . She then goes on to claim she doesn't have to worry about being bitten by bats, but the worry with being bitten by bats is rabies , not the flu. (Interestingly, bats and biting in the context of diseases would start becoming a big topic that would eventually concern the entire world less than a month after this comic was published, which Randall presumably did not know anything about) This implies she got the two confused and Cueball begins to correct her. But she just talks over him not listening to him. She then goes on to claim to now be immune to other conditions, such as poison ivy , snake venom , sunburn , contaminated water, and even computer viruses . It should be noted that a flu shot will not protect you from things other than the influenza virus. [ citation needed ]
At the end of all this, Cueball has given up on her and proclaims that he supports her attempts to test the strength of her Flu Shot, perhaps mentally adopting the philosophy of the Darwin Awards that it is good if the genes that cause a person to do incredibly dangerous, stupid things are eliminated from the gene pool.
In the title text, Cueball asks Megan how often she gets bitten by snakes and why she boils water. She answers dunno (maybe to the water part, she must at least know how often she gets bitten). She then tells that some members of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) keeps coming to her house asking about its history and possible curses, a humorous escalation which implies that Megan's absurd exposure to various forms of harm has brought them to the point of wondering if the supernatural may be involved.  (Megan may have invoked a curse on herself or her residence when she and Rob desecrated an ancient Indian burial ground and smashed up a voodoo shop in 782: Desecration .)  At the end of her reply, she mentions that she got the flu shot from one of the CDC guys, and she is thankful for that at least. This is logical as she expects it to protect her from literally any danger she has ever put herself in.
The flu shot consists of inactivated viruses from four different strains of the flu, which are those judged by the World Health Organization (WHO) to most likely be in wide circulation in the following flu season.  Because the influenza virus comes in many strains and mutates rapidly, the flu shot is generally less than 60% effective at preventing flu infections; this is a positive effect for health outcomes, but it's not exactly what most people think of as "immunity", especially compared to e.g. the 97% effectiveness of the MMR vaccine against measles , Mumps and rubella .  Statistics show that flu vaccine recipients are slightly less likely to die from a variety of other causes, but this is believed to be either because someone with the flu is more likely to have a heart attack, car accident, etc., or because of the healthy user effect (i.e. people who take the time to get non-mandatory vaccines are probably also taking better-than-average care of themselves in other ways, although this is clearly not the case with Megan in this comic strip).   Even if there is a slight protective effect, it will certainly not completely prevent harm from coming to Megan by the other sources of infection or poison she mentions, except to the extent that all of these things will be even worse for her if she is also sick with the flu:
[Megan is walking with bother her hands held up in fists. She talks to Cueball who replies to her from off-panel. His presence is revealed in the second panel.] Megan: Yesss, I got my flu shot. Cueball (off-panel): Nice! I got mine a few weeks ago. Cueball (off-panel): Immunity buddies!
[Megan spreading her arms wide in front of Cueball.] Megan: Now I can finally get bitten by all the bats I want! Cueball: No, that's rabies, that's not what-
[Closeup of Megan's head, with Cueball's reply coming from off-panel.] Megan: I'll be able to roll and play in the poison ivy without a care in the world! Cueball (off-panel): Why would you do that even if the shot did -
[In a frame-less panel Megan is flexing her arms holding her fists up, she has turned partly away from Cueball who looks at her.] Megan: No more slathering on sunscreen. No more rushing for antivenom after a snakebite. And now I can stop wasting time boiling contaminated water before drinking it!
[Megan is running away from Cueball, while she is holding one arm up, her hand making the like symbol with a thumbs up.] Megan: Gonna click on every URL in every email I get, even the ones with IP addresses and weird Unicode in them! Cueball: You know what, sure, go for it.
