Good move, taking the H1N1 if you can.

The right wing paranoia machine has been telling people not to take either the seasonal or the H1N1. They cite people who die after taking it. However, with numbers like this, people die after watching Fox News. There are no deaths due to either vaccine, and thousands due to the flu.

On the bright side, the American people are ignoring the fear mongers, and getting the shots. Availability of seasonal vaccine is the same as last year, and unlike last year, it will all be used.

The H1N1 availability is about 60% that of seasonal, and it is being snapped up, as soon as distributed.

Steve,

Don't you know that the H1N1 vaccine will sap and impurify your precious bodily fluids?

It also probably contains fluoride.

POE*
*P**
*EOP

the right wing smear machine seems to have been on target on the climategate fiasco and with regards to swine flu, the regular flu is more deadly. the govt is way more dangerous than either the regular flu or the swine flu.

In an interview with Der Spiegel magazine in Germany, epidemiologist Dr. Tom Jefferson of the Cochrane Collaboration, an organization of independent scientists evaluating all flu related studies, noted the implications of the privatization of WHO and the commercialization of health:

“…one of the extraordinary features of this influenza -- and the whole influenza saga -- is that there are some people who make predictions year after year, and they get worse and worse. None of them so far have come about, and these people are still there making these predictions. For example, what happened with the bird flu, which was supposed to kill us all? Nothing. But that doesn't stop these people from always making their predictions. Sometimes you get the feeling that there is a whole industry almost waiting for a pandemic to occur.
SPIEGEL: Who do you mean? The World Health Organization (WHO)?
Jefferson: The WHO and public health officials, virologists and the pharmaceutical companies. They've built this machine around the impending pandemic. And there's a lot of money involved, and influence, and careers, and entire institutions! And all it took was one of these influenza viruses to mutate to start the machine grinding...18

http://financialsense.com/editorials/engdahl/2009/1208.html

> More disturbingly, I learned yesterday from very reliable sources that some Chinese farming
> operations are giving tamiflu directly to their pigs -- while not necessarily altering the
> disease-incubating conditions in which they are raised and farmed. This runs the risk of dangerous
> viruses evolving key tolerances to Tamiflu, and is really dangerous.

A bunch of farmers and pharmaceutical companies who cant see half a millimeter beyond their bottom line in the next year manage to bribe food and drug regulators into getting permission to construct a plague incubator the size of most of the worlds feedlots combined?

That sounds pretty third world, that could never happen in the EU and US right?.... Right?

WaPo: FDA Rules Override Warnings About Drug
Cattle Antibiotic Moves Forward Despite Fears of Human Risk
By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 4, 2007
The government is on track to approve a new antibiotic to treat a pneumonia-like disease in cattle, despite warnings from health groups and a majority of the agency's own expert advisers that the decision will be dangerous for people.
The drug, called cefquinome, belongs to a class of highly potent antibiotics that are among medicine's last defenses against several serious human infections. No drug from that class has been approved in the United States for use in animals.
The American Medical Association and about a dozen other health groups warned the Food and Drug Administration that giving cefquinome to animals would probably speed the emergence of microbes resistant to that important class of antibiotics, as has happened with other drugs. Those super-microbes could then spread to people.
Echoing those concerns, the FDA's advisory board last fall voted to reject the request by InterVet Inc. of Millsboro, Del., to market the drug for cattle. Yet by all indications, the FDA will approve cefquinome this spring. That outcome is all but required, officials said, by a recently implemented "guidance document" that codifies how to weigh the threats to human health posed by proposed new animal drugs.
The wording of "Guidance for Industry #152" was crafted within the FDA after a long struggle. In the end, the agency adopted language that, for drugs like cefquinome, is more deferential to pharmaceutical companies than is recommended by the World Health Organization.
Cefquinome's seemingly inexorable march to market shows how a few words in an obscure regulatory document can sway the government's approach to protecting public health.
Industry representatives say they trust Guidance #152's calculation that cefquinome should be approved. "There is reasonable certainty of no harm to public health," Carl Johnson, InterVet's director of product development, told the FDA last fall.
Others say Guidance #152 makes it too difficult for the FDA to say no to some drugs. [...]