feast

In a nutshell: why?

Or to put it a little more specifically, why vaccinate everybody?

When compared with the normal seasonal forms of influenza, swine flu is significantly more mild in terms of its effects and complications than the normal flu is, meaning that if you catch normal flu you're actually very slightly more at risk than you would be if you'd caught the "pig" virus. You are of course more likely to catch swine flu - it is very virulent, and easily passed along from one individual to another, something very evident in the way it's spread from country to country so quickly. In the United Kingdom we've already had schools closed (largely the private ones where parents could afford to go to Mexico on holiday...) for brief periods of time as swine flu has got its greasy little mitts on the pupils there.

However, this does not mean any pupil died - or indeed that any pupil suffered bad repercussions. In fact, in the USA, only one person in every thousand has died after catching swine flu, and all of those thanks to underlying and serious pre-existing medical problems.

In a recession such as we're in, with healthcare already being threatened by the dwindling economy and more and more of the taxes intended to support the hospitals being diverted into benefits for those made recently unemployed, there is no surplus of money. Certainly not enough to afford mass vaccinations. If there is any conclusion we should draw from the information we have, not only from our own experiences in the Northern hemisphere, but also in the Southern hemisphere, where swine flu has been present during the traditional "flu season", it is that the only people who are seriously at risk are those who already have identifiable health conditions. We can clearly see the pattern of disease and those who are most affected by it; similarly we can clearly see the speedy recovery and relatively mild symptoms of otherwise healthy individuals.

So why, given the overwhelming evidence allowing us to identify those who are at risk of complications from those who aren't, are we considering costly and ultimately unnecessary mass vaccinations? Even when you take a look at an economy with an ill workforce, the potential financial implications of that are lower than the implications of attempting to hand out the H1N1 vaccine to every member of the public. We don't vaccinate the whole nation against seasonal flu - where is the evidence, setting aside mass hysteria, to suggest that swine flu should be treated with a different approach?