8 responses to “Swine flu vaccination – an expert writes”

1. 

   Dave Riley

   November 21, 2009 at 1:47 am

   Since I have had H1N1 I’m not going to truck any of this crap about this being ‘normal’ flu. Some literature on the left rails against the cost of the immunization program and points out correctly how much it is a profit windfall for the pharmceutcial companies.

   So? The food I eat, the beer I drink, the books I read… also profit capitalism.

   I think targeted immunization is a cautionary approach with the rest voluntary. If the governments did nothing — any government — they would leave themselves open to charges of culpability. So immunization is a panacea that we know works — whether the present vaccine does what it is supposed to do is maybe in question but that applies to all new pharmaceuticals.

   Those who take the approach of Cantaloup never mention the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak which killed 50 – 100 million people around the world including in the most isolated of communities. In fact follow up research on the H1N1 has been trying to explore the 1918 virus by taking samples from the dead from whole Inuit villages who perished in 1918 but whose remains had been preserved under the permafrost. (There is some suggestion that US biological weapons labs are trying to recreate the flu to see if it has military utility)

   Here in Australia a similar impact was suggested with the 2009 H1N1 when it started killing Indigenous Australians and was found to have penetrated to remote Aboriginal communities, and started killing the most vulnerable among a population which has the worse health statistics in the country.

   From my POV, I consider that given the impact the H1N1 had on my own health and stamina — and I am chronically ill anyway — ( as well as my shattered immunity which is still challenged months after my first symptoms) another attack may kill me.

   So at risk populations — which include pregnant women in their 3rd Trimester — warrant immunization as a matter of course.

   In that regard, I consider the easy traffic in scare literature by some sections of the left to be irresponsible. If there are problems with any vaccination program — you deal with them politically not by spreading such absurdities that this flu is not more dangerous than any other.

   However as many point out the main obstacle preventing a effective response to Swine Flu is imperialism:

   Swine Flu on Links

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2. 

   Liam

   November 21, 2009 at 8:14 am

   Dave – there is definitely an anti-scientific reaction to mass vaccination at the moment, in Britain it’s led by the mid-market right wing press with the BBC helpfully following its news agenda. The result is a re-emergence of diseases that had been virtually eliminated.

   Just as scary is the fact that some on the radical left make a curious leap from hating capitalist drug companies to thinking that voodoo like homoeopathy is a viable alternative. Bollocks to that I say.

   As I think I made clear in my little introduction I had the vaccination but it left me feeling rougher than the seasonal flu jab which is why I did a bit of homework. Some people in the medical profession have expressed reservations about the speed with which this particular vaccination was brought to market. I don’t know enough to make an informed judgement but opted for the needle as the sensible guess.

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3. 

   John Meehan

   November 21, 2009 at 9:31 am

   We must maintain a rational approach – well done Dave and Liam.

   I know someone – we will call him Jimmy – who was told a few years he needed a heart pacemaker. Being a worrier, he researched the negative side-effects, and brought them up with the consultant.

   The answer was another question :

   All that could be true, but what do you think will be the major side-effect if you do not have a pacemaker inside your body?

   Knowledge slowly dawned – Jimmy without a pacemaker would soon be dead. He accepted the machine.

   Surgery and medical care is awful and risky – but it is often necessary to restore health.

   The real issue is greater availability – universal health care – and improvements in technique and care – for example, transplantation of organs was a tremendous advance. The next step – still sadly far over the horizon – is probably genetic production of replacement organs.

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4. 

   prianikoff

   November 21, 2009 at 10:05 am

   I don’t go along with the anti-scientific approach to mass vaccination and immusation, although not many people realise that it was quite prevalent in left-wing circles during the 1920’s, when there were mass campaigns against compulsory vaccination.

   But I think there’s a justifiable worry about how quickly the vaccines being used have been rushed out and whether, there’s been proper testing of them.

   Rather oinously, reports are now coming out of a Tammiflu resistant strain of H1N1.

   http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8124987.stm

   Of course, the big drug companies shouldn’t be allowed to charge the NHS exhorbitant prices and profit from the situation.

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5. 

   skidmarx

   November 21, 2009 at 12:26 pm

   There’s been a skeptical attitude to conventional medicine in Green and alternative circles for as long as I can remember.

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6. 

   Philip Ward

   November 21, 2009 at 6:55 pm

   I agree that there is an issue with profiteering, but the rest of the article isn’t worth the electrons it is displayed with.

   Only yesterday, I was talking to a work colleague whose pre-teen daughter has had her lungs drained for the second time in a week as result of complications due to swine ‘flu. He said he was no longer “so blasé” about the disease now. It hits under 25-years olds far harder than older people.

   Link to swine flu myths, including vaccine risks:
   http://www.newscientist.com/special/swine-flu-myths-that-could-endanger-your-life

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7. 

   Jodley

   November 23, 2009 at 12:00 am

   But I think there’s a justifiable worry about how quickly the vaccines being used have been rushed out and whether, there’s been proper testing of them.

   +++++++++++

   H1N1 has not been rushed out any more quickly than any flu vaccine. Flu is always evolving, and consequently flu vaccines against it are always brought out ‘quickly’. So it is with H1N1. There are decades of experience with flu vaccines.

   It is quite right to preserve individual freedom in relation to vaccines – no one should be forced to have a vaccination. But that doesn’t mean that vaccination is morally neutral – there are situations in which people ought to have vaccines, even if they shouldn’t be forced to have them. In terms of health care professionals, vaccination is to viruses what hand washing is to bacterial infection.

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8. 

   Dave Riey

   November 23, 2009 at 8:21 am

   Jodley makes a key point. Here in Queensland alternative communities have been divided by the refusal of significant sectors of the local population to immunize their children attending pre-school and primary school for all the major immunisation regimes. Whats’ happened is that these children have been banned from attending school and mixing with those who are immunized.I think schools have the right to do that on the basis of the immunization principle of “herd immunity’ –the un-immunized put the immunized at risk. because not all vaccines take with each inoculation and the principle of vaccination is one for all, all for one.

   So the herd immunity threshold for Diptheria (a real killer until immunisation programs were established) is 85%; for Pertussis (whooping cough), 92-94%…etc.

   Obviously with H1N1 that ‘herd’ level of protection is not being .sought so in effect the program falls between two stools this greatly weakens its realiability. But in the Australian context I would hope that all indigenous Australians were immunized, for instance.

   As for a left POV: I think we have to argue that the vaccines are readily and freely available and that all at risk sectors are immunized. As for testing and such, I doubt that that is so crucial given that the H1N1 and other viruses have been under constant study for almost a century and vaccines have been produced for good effect in the past.

   The problem is a quandary that these viruses morph so easily that one batch of vaccine may not combat the new strains after they have been passed though several million humans and/or pigs. So it has to be hard to offer a guarantee. But as I suggested I don;t think there is an essential problem with H1N1 vaccines being rushed out because if it was available earlier maybe I could have prevented my own attack and others, less fortunate, may not have died.

   You have to weigh up the consequences…and options

   I was passing through Hong Kong en route back to Australia from Europe and the H1N1 scare had just hit a few weeks before. While so many wore masks I cannot see how a potent viral strain cannot wipe out much of that city’s population and as Mike Davis has pointed out the immunisation response we are discussing is one simply of walling up imperialist countries while the Third World suffers with no recourse to anything.

   That’s an epidemiological fatal flaw. which, with the increasing impact of climate change will mean that the environmental changes anywhere also alter the context in which viruses are bred and shared. AIDS for instance has been around for yonks, but it was a interface of social and environment factors which drove populations to the cities which gave the virus access to the world. Previously it was an isolated Central Aftrican zoonosis.

   Here in Australia the Hendra Virus which has killed a few veterinarians — and Hendra is a suburb next to my own — is a Fruit Bat ( Flying Fox) > Horses > Humans spread, but Flying Fox habitats have been massively destroyed and altered by human cohabitation and climate change. So there is not only more option that humans and foxes and hoses will be mixing it, but that the healthy environment of these marsupial is being destroyed thereby encouraging a larger infestation rate among bat populations.

   Since Hoses are the vector (and they too die from it) why wasn’t it a major disease here in the subtropics when horses were used as transport in such large numbers?

   But Flying Foxes visit my garden every night ….

   Similarly in way of analogy — the more squalor is created anywhere, the greater is the chances of creating disease outbreaks.

   To give you an idea how complex these inter dependent relationships are — here in Brisbane the Annual Royal Show is the EKKA (when the country comes to town!) but this year there was no pig competition, and the like porker displays, because the pig owners did not want their prized animals catching swine flu from the attending crowds.

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