Epidemics: Bird Flu Vaccine
Hey, they made a “bird flu” vaccine for humans! Hooray! Oh, wait… there’s a problem here.
Influenza H5N1 has not yet been demonstrated to be contagious between humans. For all practical purposes, every human who has caught the disease did it from handling, cleaning, cooking, eating infected chickens, or were in intimate contact with areas where those activities occurred. Babies caught it because mom had dirty hands or was carrying them while cooking, etc.
There is little to suggest that any vaccine developed against the current virus would be effective against a pandemic, human to human spread virus. It’ll be a different virus. Duh!
The panicy warnings continue. I saw an article that suggested that a flu pandemic would cause a severe economic collapse. Well, it didn’t in the three pandemics we know about. Public health professionals, if they are professional, will be honest and admit we know a lot about flu pandemics. We’ve had two in the last 50 years. We don’t know enough about pandemics to predict them, but we have enough experience with them to predict their effects.
Drawing conclusions based on the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1919 alone is laughable at best, and fraudulent at worst. Medical care, including infection control measures, has progressed far beyond those of that pandemic. People are generally healthier in the West, and thus less vulnerable to the infection turning life-threatening.
It happens with every potential biological threat, however. Anthrax was presumed to be far deadlier than it turned out to be, because a hundred years ago it was. Smallpox is presumed to be a massive threat based on epidemics in third world nations decades ago.
You cannot spend taxpayer money on threat assessments based on poor and unrelated data. When it all is said and done, it’s about money. Money to study the threat. Money to research a vaccine. Money to purchase vaccine, testing equipment, infection control materials, new desks, nifty computers, hookers in Geneva, and God alone knows what else. Remember swine flu, the flu pandemic that never happened? Too bad for those folks who had reactions to the vaccine, huh? We knew better, we really did. But it’s easier to use panic to obtain money than to use solid science.
