70 Million Swine Flu Vaccine Doses Wasted

70 Million Swine Flu Vaccine Doses Wasted











Just about everything that can
be put into the human body has an expiration date. Food eventually
spoils and goes bad; ingredients in drugs lose their effectiveness over
time. When the expiry date is up, you (should) throw the stuff out and
replace it with fresher stuff.

And so it is with vaccines. A few days ago 40 million doses of the H1N1 /
swine flu vaccine went bad; that’s over $250 million worth of drugs
too stale to use, the largest amount of a single vaccine ever produced.

And there’s more to come, since another 30 million doses will be
expiring soon. If 70 million doses end up being destroyed, that would
account for nearly half of the American stockpile of H1N1 vaccine.

Despite grave warnings by public health officials last April, the swine
flu epidemic never materialized, and in fact killed fewer people than
the annual seasonal flu varieties -- about 12,000.

In an interview with London's The Independent
newspaper, a World Health Organization advisor, Prof. Ulrich Keil,
complained that by calling the early H1N1 outbreak a “pandemic,”
countries around the world wasted precious public health money: "We know
the great killers are hypertension, smoking, high cholesterol, high
body mass index, physical inactivity and low fruit and vegetable
intake....instead [governments] wasted huge amounts of money by
investing in pandemic scenarios whose evidence base is weak."

The report continued, “The suspicion that the response to the outbreak
was an unnecessary panic has been spreading since the virus slipped from
the front pages. Even the WHO, the U.N. body that first punched the
big red button, may be having doubts. An external committee has been
set up to review its reaction and will deliver an interim report this
week, though at the moment no bombshells are expected.”

Governments and public health officials are, of course, in a no-win
situation and will be second-guessed no matter what they do. If they
don’t issue a dire warning and millions die, they will be blamed for
failing to act, and if they do issue a warning and the outbreak is not
as bad as predicted, they will be blamed for overreacting.

Medicine is not an exact science and until better prediction methods are
developed, public funds will continue to be wasted in a “better safe
than sorry” approach to infectious disease.

Source:-
http://news.discovery.com/human/the-70-million-swine-flu-vaccine-doses-wasted.html