H1N1 vaccine: yay or nay?

[Trotskie]

Here's how I decided:

Imagine that you are heading down the road, about to cross through an intersection.  Green light for you.  As you are about at the crossroads, you notice another car heading in from your left, oblivious of the red light.  Now answer quickly without analyzing.  Do you:

A. Speed up
B. Hit the brakes

Think about what your answer says about who you are and apply what you have learned to question at hand.

[DoodleJump!]

I got it a few weeks ago at my college. There were at least 5-7 cases of H1N1 that I know of on our campus earlier during the semester.

[hugman]

i'm with bobo.

there's a fine line to walk when trusting the "scientific community".

where's fredericks when you need him?

[Keith Whitener]

What made me lean strongly toward yay was Spoony's comment.

[Reeleyes]

My wife got the vaccine and within 24 hours had a horrible cold and a pounding migraine that lasted for 4 days. I didn't and I haven't been sick since last year.

[Gilly]

So, the vaccine must not be as limited as it was a month ago huh?

[Martin]

[fonpr]

So you're against it?

[SJK]

There is sound scientific logic for immunization. Fear has been driving some poor decision making in Canada...supplies running short, how the media covered the issue, people jumping to the front of the line. Consult your physician if unsure what to do, act accordingly.

Below is an article from cbc.ca website that I thought made good sense considering all of the information from print and tv news services.

Public health officials and journalists have overstated the importance of the swine flu, a former Ontario chief medical officer of health says.

Dr. Richard Schabas, chief medical officer of health for Hastings and Prince Edward Counties in eastern Ontario, said the H1N1 influenza outbreak needs to be put into proper perspective.

About 200,000 people die in Canada every year from all causes combined, including about 4,000 from seasonal flu.

"By the time all the dust has settled on H1N1, somewhere between 200 and 300 people will have died in this country," Schabas said Thursday during a panel on media coverage of H1N1 on CBC News The National.

Schabas criticized the media for not trying to put the story into perspective, and for being "a little too easy to spin sometimes" by public health officials.

"I'm not letting the media off the hook totally, but I think the real villains of the piece here have been those public health officials who have consistently overplayed and overstated the importance of what is happening," he said.

"By the time all is said and done, this is not a major public health event, but you'd never know that from what some people are saying."

13-year-old's death

The panel also looked at the front-page coverage given to the death of Evan Frustaglio, a 13-year-old hockey player from Toronto. Evan died on the eve of the H1N1 vaccine becoming available, and demand for the vaccine jumped overnight, catching health officials by surprise.

"It was very clear when we were reporting the lines that most of the people in there did say, 'We came because we saw the story about that little boy,' " CBC reporter Ioanna Roumeliotis said.

Evan's death and his grieving father's plea to parents to consider vaccinating their children was a tremendous human interest story, agreed Dr. Allison McGeer, an infectious disease specialist at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital.

But "I'm quite sure that the people who were reporting that didn't necessarily think about what the consequences of that would be or the context that was in," McGeer said. "What we saw afterwards was that it caused an enormous amount of fear and anxiety that we would all like not to have seen."

A healthy child in Canada is about 20 times more likely to be killed by a car than by the H1N1 virus, Schabas said, but that isn't going to make the national news.

"Children actually die of flu every year and a few more die of H1N1. This was not unexpected, and the way it was presented — as if this was a sudden bolt out of the blue, some change in our perspective of H1N1 — that's what created the anxiety. It was the way it was presented."

Link to original article:
http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2009/11/06/h1n1-media.html

[Reeleyes]

So, the vaccine must not be as limited as it was a month ago huh?

My wife works in health care, they provided vaccines for the staff. I'm not anti vaccine but she did have a bad reaction to it. I've never had a flu shot in my life though and I've never had the flu so I just don't feel that it's necessary.

[Matt C]

The good old fashioned flu is deadly, this is a joke in comparison, but America seems to enjoy living in fear.

[yesno]

The good old fashioned flu is deadly, this is a joke in comparison, but America seems to enjoy living in fear.

You should get the regular flu shot every year, too--especially if you work in an office environment, by the way. I'm not sure that the people in this thread suggested that this flu is much worse.

[SJK]

What Spoony said...yay Spoony!

What's underlying the H1N1 concerns isn't that if you get it, there's no coming back. The CDC is looking ahead to the next pandemic, and that's the Avian flu. That never went away and even though the hysteria around it has cooled, it's still a countdown until that becomes a pandemic. Why it's relevant is because if you've had H1N1, you're twice as likely to contract the Avian version, for which there is no cure. The more people who are vaccinated against H1N1, the more people won't have the wrecked immunities that will make the Avian flu worse than it could be.

[Matt C]

The good old fashioned flu is deadly, this is a joke in comparison, but America seems to enjoy living in fear.

You should get the regular flu shot every year, too--especially if you work in an office environment, by the way. I'm not sure that the people in this thread suggested that this flu is much worse.

Didn't say they did, it's an overall thing.

[emma]

Spoony is right about everything!

I always get the flu shot and I got this one too. A lot of people in my family have super bad allergies/asthma/weak immune systems for other reasons and as a result I think it's bullshit when people say things like "I don't usually get sick so I'm just not going to bother." You're not the only person in the universe. If you can do something that will prevent you from getting contagiously sick in some way, do it.