With autumn’s commencement, we can look forward to pumpkin spice everything, leaves transforming into red and orange hues and an excuse to wear our favorite fuzzy sweaters.

However, we tend to forget the more unsavory elements of the season, namely the flu.

Now, some of you may buy into the Jenny McCarthy’s “pseudoscience,” as CBS so aptly refers to it, or the myth that vaccines cause autism.  If McCarthy doesn’t want to protect dear Evan against diseases like the flu, tuberculosis, polio, HPV, measles, or the chicken pox—many of which crippled past populations—that’s  her choice, but by all accounts, it’s unwise.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there is absolutely no link between vaccines and autism.  Emily Willingham and Laura Helft of NOVA agree.

“The assertion that vaccines could be linked to autism burst onto the international stage with the 1998 publication of a paper in the British journal The Lancet,” they said.   “The paper, which suggested a link between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism, was eventually retracted in 2010. Even before the complete retraction, however, in 2004, ten of the paper’s 13 authors cosigned a partial retraction of its main interpretation.”

Vaccines are made of inactivated forms of the disease, which counteract the bacterial or viral effects.  Inactivated disease forms, or antigens, are preserved in trace amounts of chemicals to prevent them from losing their potency, the CDC said.

To reiterate, antigens are not activated.  They serve to help your immune system by allowing it to build up lymphocytes and B-cells, which recognize the disease and destroy it.

The flu vaccine is reviewed on a year to year basis and includes three to four different forms researchers believe are most likely to impact the population that season.

Yet, if you still have doubts about the science and buy into McCarthy’s methodology, I entreat you to enjoy all of the benefits of the flu: sniffling, sneezing, vomiting, fever, headache, chills and a slew of other pleasantries.

Then again, you could just brace for the needle, get the vaccine and consume copious amounts of pumpkin pie instead of writhing in bed.  It’s entirely your choice.