To think if you're going to spend a lot of money vaccinating children against flu you should make sure it works?

[bumbleymummy]

A massive push for vaccinating young children. Lots of guilt tripping if you decided against it - you're selfish/putting people at risk etc. Turns out it doesn't work anyway! Ridiculous.

"Why are kids being vaccinated?"

Response to parental pressure and campaigning.

Vaccination has always been available to 'at risk' groups, which can include those living under same roof (or not) and the very young. So some children were being done and not others, or were done one year and not the next, and all sorts of other anomalies. That pile of inconsistencies, plus public campaigning for it to be available to anyone who wants it, plus a year with a nasty strain which was correctly foreseen and included in the jab, led to a phased introduction to more of the population.

Oh look. Ignorance. What a surprise.

I thought the idea of giving the flu nasal spray to children was more to stop them passing it on to older people? Was it to protect against the same strains of flu as the adult vaccine?

It seems that this flu outbreak has affected old people in care homes more than anywhere else, and I don't imagine that all that many primary school children are in contact with the residents of care homes.

From the many strains of flu they get to put three in the vaccine each year.
There are teams of people across the globe monitoring flu strains in wild birds and pigs (where our flu strains come from). They make the very best decision they can based on a massive amount of data.
They don't always get it right as flu is a very tricky individual.

I am not entirely convinced by the authorities saying that they couldn't have done anything about it.

From the Guardian article quoted above:

"He also conceded that WHO first detected the strain in March, but even that was too late to produce an effective vaccine in time for this winter."

“The recommendations made by WHO [on this season’s vaccine] came out in February. The manufacturers started work. It is a long lengthy process – five our six months. By the time we became aware of the extent of it there was very little that could be done.”

February/March + six months = August, September. It sounds more like someone made the wrong decision rather than a lack of time.

Viruses find a way of fighting back. Sly little things they are.

Yes, the immunisations are offered from September onwards.

Any new strain that emerges as late as March cannot be included in the northern hemisphere jabs.

Is the proposal that we should begin the vaccination programme later than currently? If so, when? And what would be the interface with the schedules in the rest of Europe?

And whilst they had detected the strain at that point, they had not measured its extent or identified it precisely, so it would have taken a lot longer before the drug companies could have stared to make the vaccine.

You don't have to be convinced, however. You can continue to believe that the WHO and world governments want people to die needlessly!

Sorry I'm only getting back to this thread now. I had actually completely forgotten about it!

My point was mainly that with such a 'push' to increase the vaccine uptake (including all the information about the risks of flu that was put out there) having such an ineffective vaccine makes it look a bit ridiculous. I doubt it will instil public confidence next year.