Be very cautious when citing anything from Fox News, such as that brief note from former CDC director Tom Frieden. Their track record on accuracy, much less their admitted biased opinions, suggests to me they should be renamed Faux News.
Thanks to whomever (was it GO-NAD!?) cited the CDC reference page concerning
Misconceptions about Seasonal Flu and Flu Vaccines. I trust that info.
In particular, people who claim, or repeat claims they've heard, that flu vaccines give you the flu are absolutely wrong. They can get a reaction that gives them some flu-like symptoms (aches, pain and malaise) that lasts about a day. This is nothing like the real flu, for many reasons. The primary reason is that the real flu is contagious. Those flu-like symptoms resulting from vaccine injections cannot be passed on to others.
It's been known for some time that as people age, the standard flu vaccines don't induce sufficient immunity. Using injections with higher doses of flu antigen in older people has been shown to be effective in clinical trials.
Whenever I hear people claim they have never had the flu, or haven't had it for years, I have to wonder if they know what they did and didn't have. I have personally known someone who came to work while sick with micoplasma pneumonia. He swore he wasn't sick, but he infected 3 others at work. He also claimed he never had the flu. If he never noticed he had walking pneumonia, then he probably never noticed he had the flu.