Good short piece in The New Yorker by an award-winning science journalist debunking the nitwit notion that the H1N1 vaccine is more dangerous than the disease it prevents. Last two paragraphs:
"...Though this H1N1 virus is novel, the vaccine is not. It was made and tested in exactly the same way that flu vaccines are always made and tested. Had this strain of flu emerged just a few months earlier, there would not have been any need for two vaccines this year; 2009 H1N1 would simply have been included as one of the components in the annual vaccine. "Meanwhile, the virus has now appeared in a hundred and ninety-one countries. It has killed almost four thousand people and infected millions of others. The risks are clear and so are the facts. But, while scientists and public-health officials have dealt effectively with the disease, they increasingly confront a different kind of contagion: the spurious alarms spread by those who would make us fear vaccines more than the illnesses they prevent." http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2009/10/12/091012taco_talk_specter http://tinyurl.com/yeguzlc N.B.: The first sentence of the second paragraph above does NOT imply that the H1N1 flu is any more dangerous than the seasonal flu, except in the sense that more people are vulnerable to it because it's novel, so nobody has preexisting immunity. H1N1 is no more *virulent*--does not cause any more serious disease--than the seasonal flu, as the writer makes clear earlier in the article. *All* flu is dangerous, and we should all get our flu shots, both seasonal and H1N1, to protect ourselves and to protect others who might catch it from us if we come down with it.
