And if frogs had wings...

...they wouldn't bump their little green butts on the ground when they hop...

(Ok, gang, this one turned out a lot longer than I intended, but honestly, the more I kept reading on it, the more interesting it got...)

Consider this more of a public service announcement than anything else - perhaps a reminder of what can happen when the government rushes a plan like this into action... and what can happen when the public blindly follows along...

First, consider this report from 60 minutes from 1978:





So why bring it up now? Well, perhaps because of articles like this one from the UK's Sky News:

'All Brits' To Be Vaccinated For Swine Flu

The entire population could be vaccinated against swine flu as health chiefs draw up plans to build a nationwide immunity to the disease.

In what would be the biggest vaccination programme of the last 50 years, experts are already formulating a priority list of patients before the bug becomes more virulent.

The fast-tracking comes after the first British patient without underlying health problems succumbed to the disease - the 15th swine flu death in the UK.

Peter Holden, the British Medical Association's lead negotiator on swine flu, told The Sunday Times: "The high risk groups will be done at GPs' surgeries."

He added: "If the virus does (mutate), it can get a lot more nasty, and the idea is to give people immunity.

"But the sheer logistics of dealing with 60 million people can't be underestimated."

Oh, btw, you may have noticed the phrase "fast-tracking" in the above article... Apparently that's a reference to the concept talked about in this article from the Times Online:

Swine flu vaccine rushed through safety checks

A swine flu vaccine will be fast-tracked for use in Britain within five days once it is developed, and 130 million doses are on order.

The Department of Health expects to have enough vaccine this year to give it to half the population. Further supplies will be available if needed. Each person will need two doses of the vaccine, unless one single jab is found to provide high rates of immunity.

The first doses specific to the H1N1 swine flu virus are set to arrive in September and could be given regulatory approval in less than a week.

Yep, that's right... FIVE DAYS... andd this is despite the fact, according to the same article, that

Peter Holden, the British Medical Association’s lead negotiator on swine flu, said that although swine flu was not generally causing serious illness in patients, health officials were eager to start a mass vaccination campaign, starting first on groups that were susceptible to infection or prone to complications.

Oh, and the manufacturers of this fast-tracked vaccine? Ahh, that would be, according to this article from the Chicago Tribune, Illinois-based Baxter Pharmeceuticals... Why was Baxter chosen? Well, one would have to guess it's related to this: Baxter spokesman Christopher Bona said Saturday that Baxter has patented technology that allows the company to develop vaccines in half the time it usually takes – about 13 weeks instead of 26.

Great news, right? especially since Baxter must have a terrific record for safety to be entrusted with such an important rush job, right? Oh, wait...

from the Times of India:

It's emerged that virulent H5N1 bird flu was sent out by accident from an Austrian lab last year and given to ferrets in the Czech Republic before anyone realised. >As well as the risk of it escaping into the wild, the H5N1 got mixed with a human strain, which might have spawned a hybrid that could unleash a pandemic.

Last December, the Austrian branch of US vaccine company Baxter sent a batch of ordinary human H3N2 flu, altered so it couldn't replicate, to Avir Green Hills Biotechnology, also in Austria. In February, a lab in the Czech Republic working for Avir alerted Baxter that, unexpectedly, ferrets inoculated with the sample had died. It turned out the sample contained live H5N1, which Baxter uses to make vaccine. The two seem to have been mixed in error.

Markus Reinhard of Baxter says no one was infected because the H3N2 was handled at a high level of containment. But Ab Osterhaus of Erasmus University in the Netherlands says: "We need to go to great lengths to make sure this kind of thing doesn't happen."

Oh, and just in case you think this is just of concern and will only be mandatory for people in the UK, consider this from a recent article from Time magazine entitled How to Deal with Swine Flu: Heeding the Mistakes of 1976: (and be sure to note the use of the word "when", not "if")...

Howard Markel, director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan and a historical consultant to the CDC on flu pandemics, says the most vexing decision facing health officials is when to institute mass vaccination programs.Vaccines carry risks of complications, leading to agonizing ethical dilemmas. In 1976, Ford offered indemnity to the vaccine manufacturers. But according to reports, President George W. Bush decided in 2002 not to administer a nationwide smallpox vaccination program — despite Vice President Dick Cheney's belief that doing so was a prudent counterterrorism step — because it could have resulted in dozens of deaths (the smallpox vaccine kills between 1 and 2 people per million people inoculated).

Markel says the political climate in the U.S. is much less combustible today than in the post-Watergate era, when Ford faced a skeptical public. Even so, he says, citizens still need to trust that the government is working for the greater good. He says, "The good news is that our surveillance, methodology and public health professionals have never been better. But we are human and mistakes may be made — as happened with the 1976 swine flu affair — and we may jump the gun in the hope of preserving life. The current outbreak is a situation in flux. The American public has to be forgiving and patient and do [their] part too."

In other words, trust the government... they know what they're doing... even when they obviously don't...

Oh, and one other little tidbit... let's not forget this little story from Maryland late last year when officials were threatening to jail parents who didn't get their kids innoculated.. and how reasonable both CNN and the Vanderbilt professor they're jiving for make it all sound...



Yeah, I'm certainly gonna rush right out and get a shot as soon as they're announced... How about you?