Throw Away

By ACSH Staff — Jul 01, 2010

The AP reports that a quarter of the H1N1 vaccines produced in the US will be thrown away. Some believe that the World Health Organization may have overblown the issue.

Some critics have simply lamented that a lot of anxiety was raised and money wasted, not just during the swine flu scare but also in government responses to bird flu and SARS, a respiratory virus that swept parts of Asia in 2003.

"Each time the so-called experts told us that millions of people would be killed worldwide by the respective viruses. We have learned that the experts were utterly wrong," said Dr. Ulrich Keil, a professor at Germany's prestigious University of Muenster and a WHO adviser.

But this is 20-20 hindsight, argues ACSH's Jeff Stier. It s also possible that because we vaccinated many people early that we did not see the disease spread as much as was predicted.

Many health experts agree that the manufacturing and purchasing of extra doses was a prudent choice given the potential harm of H1N1. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spokesman Bill Hall, for example, states:

Although there were many doses of vaccine that went unused, it was much more appropriate to have been prepared for the worst-case scenario than to have had too few doses.

ACSH's Dr. Elizabeth Whelan reminds us that this is not unusual. The same thing happens with the seasonal flu. Doctors recommend that everyone get a flu shot, but not everyone does, and we end up discarding tens of thousands of doses each year.