H1N1 Vaccine: What The Pork?

I'm having a dilemma these days, one I'm not used to pondering. I'm uneasy about the H1N1 vaccine. Does it strike anyone else as strange how fast a vaccine was developed for this strain of influenza? I have personally known at least four individuals who have contracted H1N1 since Labor Day, three of them children, one of them with some serious complications. This flu has been moving in and out of the ranks of Americans (and no doubt around the world) like a stealth operator on a secret mission in a faraway land. I am starting to think that this vaccine may be too little, too late. However, Li'l G's school is administering this vaccine in mist form next week, and I'm starting to get cold feet about it.

To vaccine or not to vaccine? That is the question...

Let's establish one fact: I support vaccinations. I have made it a priority to keep my children up to date on all of their vaccinations since birth and plan on keeping it that way. All three of us got the flu vaccine just after Labor Day this year, and amazingly, the kids have been in pretty good health, even though I was laid out with a pretty nasty virus about 10 days after the vaccine. However, I believe that there is a good reason to vaccine our babies against polio, TB, MMR, and so on. I have known a man who has spent nearly his entire life, since childhood I believe, in a wheelchair ever since he contracted polio. There is a reason why our infant mortality rates and childhood mortality rates are some of the lowest in the world, folks. Vaccines are not the evils that some people think they are.

That being said, I know we need to be cautious about the ingredients in vaccines. Certain agents, such as thimerosal, have been linked to causing autism in children, and I know a family who believes this is what happened to their child. Vaccines are not perfect, but by-and-large, my personal belief is that they accomplish the goal set forth by the doctors and professionals who set out to develop them.

I just have an uneasy feeling about this, however; it's nagging at me, and I cannot simply ignore it. I talk to my friends who are Vietnam vets and they are only halfway joking as they mock the medics, "Agent Orange is safe. Your government wouldn't make you do something that's going to be harmful." And so on...

Even though I did not vote the current administration into office, I do not believe that Obama and the scientists at NIH and other governmental agencies sit around a bubbling, green beaker in a back-alley lab, stirring this foaming concoction with a rusty spoon like Doctor Jekyll, and when the spoon dissolves they toss back their heads and gargle out, "Yess, finally, the vaccine is complete! Mwaa haa haaaa...!"

So why, then, am I so distrusting of this vaccine? I don't really know. It just seems to have come out so fast. Has it even had a chance to be tested properly? I don't know. On the other hand, if it's possible to crank out this vaccine in such record time, why does it take others years, decades even, to reach the masses of dying, suffering people? Is it due to corruption? Needing to allow the scientific process to run its course? I don't know. I just have so many questions and little time in which to find answers to them.

The other thing I find disconcerting is accessibility. The government is in charge of distribution. My hospital told me last month not to come to them for the vaccine, that they would not be receiving any. The public schools are going to have them for students and teachers. Active duty military will get them. Active duty military dependents will have access to them through their healthcare on post, but what about people like me, military who have been pushed into the private sector? What about the millions of people with no direct link to government? The homeless and/or insuranceless? And these vaccines are being handed out for free?!? Am I the only one smelling a rat here?

I'm sure my hospital has gotten more information in recent days since vaccines will be coming out this week and weeks to come. Either way, it's a sign of the times to be sure. I don't want to risk my children's very lives by not vaccinating them; however, they are not petri dishes on legs, available for governmental research. So help me out here, guys: what do you plan to do?