Montreal's vaccination plan remains intact, however. "We're moving as quickly as we can in relation to the availability of the vaccine," says Dr. David Levine, president of the Montreal Health Agency (MHA). Health care workers started being inoculated Oct. 26, other high-risk groups will follow, and healthy adults will wait until Dec. 7.
Yet despite combined municipal, provincial and federal efforts, just 49 percent of Canadians want the vaccine. Many see a suspicious discrepancy between the monotonous propaganda and the true nature of H1N1's threat.
That discrepancy has bureaucratic roots: On June 11, the World Health Organization declared H1N1 a "pandemic," meaning that countries would produce vaccines under the WHO's pandemic guidelines. Anti-vaccination noise began online during the first wave of H1N1, considered mild, while officials, fearful of saying something wrong, simply said the same things over and over again. Now, standard procedure is under question, such as how the vaccine was made so quickly?
Since 2001, Health Canada has had a standing order with GlaxoSmithKline to make a pandemic vaccine if needed, but considering that some of the ingredients for the H1N1 vaccine were already approved, including adjuvants that make
Still, questions continue about how necessary the voluntary vaccination is. While the virus may be mild for one person, the vaccine is safer for the population as a whole - public health is about the most acceptable risk, Lessard says, "We don't think it's a good idea to accept a certain number of dead people."
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