Over at H5N1, Crof picked up a story from XinHua reporting the concerns of Canadian medical ethicist Arthur Schafer about swine flu immunization. “There are serious public health issues and issues of ethics as to whether we should be distributing (vaccines) massively to healthy people… when there are really big question marks about their effectiveness and their safety,” Schafer said.
Schafer is arguing for a precautionary-principle approach: why would you take the chance of exposing a lot of people to a vaccine too new to allow its long-term effects to be known perfectly? Especially, we might add, when the flu outbreak you are confronting is very mild, thus far?
Not everyone finds this satisfying, though. In fact, some people feel there’s a duty to protect the public against the eventuality of widespread virulent flu. (Two facts should trouble this argument: the historical fact that such a flu outbreak has happened exactly once in history, and the ancillary fact that, even in 1918, before flu immunization existed, the outbreak spared over 99% of the American public. But they don’t. We’ll ignore them for now, just as most people do.).