What if you had a pandemic and no one came?

Just change the way you measure those infected. In a remarkable development the CDC has announced that they are going to change the way that Swine flu cases are defined. It seems the grand total of 1200 deaths from H1N1 wasn't sufficiently scaring the hell out of people enough to go out and get vaccinated so why not bump up the numbers to put a chill in the air?

While the news media is widely reporting long lines at clinics for the vaccine other sources suggest a different story. In New York last week officials were prepared to administer 31,500 vaccinations a day at seven free clinics throughout the city. The total vaccinations administered on Saturday was 1,701. The New York Times reported vaccine workers standing around with nothing to do and officials perplexed by the low turnout.

Meanwhile government officials and vaccine manufacturers were hauled before Congress which was investigating why so little vaccine had made it to the public and here we are dead in the middle of the season. Everyone blamed those slow virus growing chicken eggs, the public’s fear of vaccines and regulatory hurdles that won’t allow them to use adjuvants. Only 49 million doses had been delivered by this week.

All of this doesn’t seem so much a mystery to me. The drug companies were paid ahead of time to produce the vaccines, surveys of your average earthling revealed that more than half would not get the vaccine, low turnouts materialized so why would the vaccine manufacturers spend any more money to produce more vaccine when they probably won’t be able to get what they will produce off their shelves by the end of the season?

$1.5 billion was paid by the US government for Swine flu vaccine – that’s $600 per taxpayer. In what seems incredible Glaxo won’t tell what they are getting from the UK government for its H1N1 concoction and Baxter settled out of court after accusations of fraud for overcharging for their Swine flu vaccine. Despite this Britain still went ahead and contracted with them for 132 million doses!

Its like getting vaccine out of the back of a panel van in the alley from your local neighborhood criminal. 

And these are the people we are supposed to trust when they tell us to just roll up our sleeve and get in line? I'm sure such criminal behavior would never spill over into the science or manufacturing of the vaccine - right? 

Despite the changes in definitions to bump up the numbers some experts don’t seem to think there is anything to worry about. Ira M. Longini Jr., a flu epidemiologist at the University of Washington and Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, both said the new figure doesn’t come close to the 90,000 people Obama said would drop dead this flu season. 

In fact according to Dr. Longini deaths were likely to be in the 30,000-to-40,000 range, and Osterholm said they would “have a long way to go to even get there.”

Sounds like a typical flu season to me.

As always I look forward to your feedback, comments and suggestions.

Matthew McCoy DC, MPH
matthewmccoy@comcast.net
Editor - Journal of Pediatric, Maternal & Family Health - Chiropractic
http://www.chiropracticpediatricresearch.net