Are You Scared to Have the Swine Flu Vaccine?

There seems to be widespread anxiety about the H1N1 vaccine in development. For instance, half the healthcare workers in Hong Kong who were asked said they’d already decided not to have the vaccine, because they were afraid of its safety and doubted its effectiveness. In the USA, a number of critics see the extremely rapid development of the vaccine – human safety and efficacy studies crammed into a couple of months – as rather risky.

Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is optimistic about the safety issue. Human trials in the US started August 7, and there have been “no red flags at all”, according to Dr Fauci. He’s not surprised, because the vaccine is extremely similar to the seasonal vaccines produced each year.

While there are no immediate side effects, rare ones – those that occur in less than 1 in 100,000 people – would only come to light after millions of people have been vaccinated. And that wouldn’t be until both 2010 and the pandemic are well advanced.

In 1976 there was another swine flu threat, and another rapid development of a vaccine. In fact, the epidemic never materialized (it was confined to 240 soldiers stationed at Fort Dix), and 500 people out of millions who got vaccinated developed a rare condition called Guillan-Barre syndrome; 25 of them died.

But this swine flu is very different from the 1976 version. It’s already infected more than 200,000 people worldwide, and killed more than 2,000 of them. So I recommend the odds of effectiveness being greater than those of getting side effects.  Of course, it’s easy for me to say this. Being over 65 and in good health, I’m not on the list of those for whom the vaccine is recommended.  This is because supplies are limited, and the “over-65s” have probably developed immunity to flu strains close to the H1N1A over the decades. We’ll see!