@Don: IANAB, so no idea. As I understand it the samples take a while to process and then, yes, they rush to get a vaccine out for whatever strain is most virulent every year. The Swine is a mutant flu though, so perhaps it’s monkey-wrenched the assembly line? But really I’m just parroting the random info trickling down to me through the telescreen: “Flu shot rations are up this year!”, etc.

I’ve also read that we have a semi-fixed* production capacity for flu shots of about a billion doses. If we switch that capacity over to H1N1 we will, of necessity, produce fewer H5N3 shots (or whatever this year’s “normal” strain is, I vaguely recall numbers like that from my pre-jog, pre-coffee, warm bed alarm news haze). There’s some optimal distro, some balancing point, that we’d have to find. Imagine if H1N1 took a binary shot like they said it might early on — we’d burn two regular doses for one swine dose, so our total viral coverage would plummet.

I heard somewhere (prolly CBC) that people who get regular flu shots might, somehow, be more susceptible to H1N1 — but who knows? If this a media virus the first symptom seems to be an inability to report consistent information. All-in I’d feel comfortable wagering that H1N1 memes will cause more stress than H1N1 genes this time out, as long as I got reasonable odds.

Just now the CDC, via the CBC, said they’d be releasing educational materials once the vaccine is ready to go. I think it was them. Some talking head, anyway.

* Squishy business speak for “we’d need to invest more”.

Is the H1N1 flu vaccine really being grown differently? I had been planning on getting seasonal and H1N1 flu shots this fall. I usually get a flu shot every year.

Anyway, I found one thing and one thing only that truly gave respite from the symptoms: Marijuana. Imagine you’ve been as sick as you can remember for five days: constant pain, fever, nausea. You’re so desperate for relief you’ll try anything. You’ve heard about medical marijuana so you smoke a joint and then for an hour you feel completely normal again, even hungry and happy.

It was like a gift from the bleeding hands of Jesus Hisself.

The last time H1N1 attacked the humans was just after WWI and 50% of the worldwide population caught it. Most of the fatalities from that outbreak came from pneumonia, but now we know about antibiotics so that’s not too worrisome.

Similarly during one of the last major outbreaks there was a “light” Spring/Summer infection cycle followed by a really deadly onslaught in Fall/Winter. We’ve just been through the former and are heading into the latter. I wonder to what extent the pattern will repeat. I don’t think we’ll ever have a sample size to model these things effectively ahead of time, they’re all black swans.

New vaccines are dangerous. That one researcher who just died from the plague was working with a supposedly-deactivated strain. I guess I should read more about how they’re developing this vaccine. Simple math though: Even if it only adversely effects one in a thousand people that’s still millions worldwide, starting with children, natives*, pregnant women, and the elderly. I would actually expect the first wave of vaccinations to be relatively lethal.

I think a large part of my dissonance is coming from the jornos being all, “ur all gonna die, lulz” and actual doctors saying, “just wash your hands and you’ll be fine.” That’s a big gap.

* I have no idea why the natives let us test vaccines on them. If I was them I wouldn’t trust us, certainly not in the first wave of injections. I barely trust us now and my people have never been victims of germ warfare flavored genocide. Would every Jew in the world willingly take a shot of an untested drug from a German pharmaceutical concern? No? Then why would every Kwakiutl?

It is a collective action problem because vaccinations only work if the majority of the people get them done. If the numbers drop below a certian majority than the diseases can come back and inflitrate the whole population. Measles and polio outbreaks occur because too many parents began to not vaccinate their children. I once talked to a nurse who was very upset about polio begin back in the population in canada because they had eradicated it for many years and it shouldn’t be back.

There’s a study, which I’m too lazy to find right now, that modeled H1N1 and decided that we should just vaccinate all the school children and leave the adults unvaccianted.