The race is on – the ‘lucky’ pharmaceutical companies charged with saving mankind from the dreaded swine flu, have developed a vaccine and are now ready to see if it works.
Forgive me if I sound somewhat, well, cynical. But there are a few questions that remain unanswered before I’m willing to jump on the panic wagon…
Do we really need to get vaccinated to prevent dying of swine flu?
This is a question you will need to answer very soon, because the authorities in each country will be pushing mass vaccination programs. The UK government have already said they will vaccinate their whole population, and Germany has plans to start vaccinating their citizens in September.
I would have thought that a vaccination is considered necessary when a disease is causing widespread suffering and even death.
The WHO (World Health Organisation) is warning that the swine flu is the “fastest moving pandemic ever”. Isn’t this reason enough to be vaccinated? Maybe.
There are actually two things that make a disease dangerous – prevalence and virulence. And we don’t seem to be hearing enough about this.
The ‘prevalence’ of a disease is the percentage of people in a population with that disease. And yes, the prevalence of swine flu amongst the population IS becoming very high. Many people have contracted this virus.
The ‘virulence’ of a disease is the measure of the severity of the disease. Our family knows the Australian NRL football player, Ben Hannant, who came down with the swine flu some weeks ago. His comment was that it’s no worse than an average case of the flu and he recovered within a week. And that seems to be the worst that most people are experiencing, some have no more than a slight cold.
Now, according to the WHO (World Health Organisation) for a disease to be considered a pandemic it only has to satisfy the criteria of prevalence, not prevalence AND virulence.
But for a disease to be dangerous it needs to be both prevalent and virulent. And that description does not fit swine flu!
So why are they even bothering to produce a vaccine if the virus is only producing a mild reaction?
The lead time for developing and releasing a vaccination to the market is many years. That usually means the outlay of millions of dollars. So the pharmaceutical companies obviously need to sell their product to as many people as possible to make a decent profit, bless their hearts, otherwise the exercise is pointless.
The faster this Swine Flu vaccine can get to market the more money can be made!
Getting a drug of any sort into the market place in less than 12 months is unheard of. Yet that is exactly what is being done. So logic must dictate that corners have been cut somewhere. The only way we’ll know just what compromises have been made will be in say five years time when we look back and count the real cost.
And just what will we see – unanticipated adverse reactions that cause the immune system to attack the nerves and paralyse the muscles? Or perhaps there’ll be more deaths from the vaccine than the virus itself? If that all sounds far fetched that’s exactly what happened in 1976 in the USA when they first vaccinated against swine flu.
So will I or my family be vaccinated against swine flu?
When pigs fly!
Tags: flu vaccine, swine flu vaccine
