Who Will Get the Swine Flu (H1N1) vaccine first?

If you have been thinking about getting the H1N1 shot and you can't find any shots, here is the list in order of priority of high risk groups. When all of these groups have been immunized the rest of us will have our chance.

    •    Pregnant women;

    •    People who live with or care for infants younger than 6 months of age;

    •    Healthcare workers (HCWs) and emergency medical personnel;

    •    Persons 6 months to 24 years of age;

    •    Persons 25-64 years of age who have chronic diseases (including immunodeficiency states) that      pose risk for influenza.

When more vaccine becomes available, the following persons should be vaccinated:
    •    Healthy persons ages 25-64 years; and
    •    Adults 65 years of age and older.

Patients on the high-priority list should be vaccinated as soon as the vaccine is available. Individuals with the highest priority, as listed above, should be vaccinated first, but stringency of methods to restrict vaccine use is unclear.
Contraindications to the inactivated vaccine include:
    •    Previous Guillain-Barré syndrome;
    •    Life-threatening reaction to previous influenza vaccination; and
    •    Severe illness (a "moderately or severely ill" patient is advised to wait, but a mild upper respiratory infection or other illness is not a contraindication).
Note that pregnancy and breastfeeding are not contraindications to receiving the inactivated vaccine.
The above information is from an article posted yesterday on MedScape. I highly recommend you read it for further details, especially the contraindications to using the LAIV - live attentuated nasal vaccine, which is going to be the vaccine form used in many schools to mass immunize children in school without injections.

This article clarifies a number of issues around safety testing, side effects and vaccine production. Adjuvants such as squalene are NOT in this vaccine. Thimerosal (containing mercury) is in the vaccine. If you don't like this idea, think about the alternative which is risking death from the H1N1 infection. 46% of hospitalized adults with H1N1 complications had no prior medical history. The number of children dying from H1N1 is climbing. Read this article for further sad details.
 
Distribution of the shots to doctors in the US is through local Public Health Departments. I have had 500 shots on order since September and received only 10 so far which went to my high risk patients very quickly. No one can tell me when I might get more. No matter what you may see in the news about the shots being widely available., they are not as of now.

drBob

Comments

[Stephanie Raffelock]

Dr Bob. Thanks for getting the crucial information out there. As one who has been in the alternative health world for decades, I think we have to really weigh the statistics when it comes to this vaccine. Because my company deals with pregnant women and new mothers, we are taking a middle ground approach which is: unless you have solid medical reasons which would contraindicate this vaccine...GET IT NOW. Pregnant women seem to be particularly susiptble to this virus resulting in hospitalization and death.

I say, get the vaccine and then also do everything natural that you know how to do to keep your immune sytem up. This includes eating well,(forego the sugar)exercising, getting supplemental vitamin D, plenty of rest and washing your hands throughout the day, especially when you are out in the world. The virus as I understands it enters into the nose and mouth, so if your hands pick us something and you then scratch your nose, now you got it. Teaching your kids to wash their hands several times a day is a good practice too.

Sometimes the conventional medical world and the alternative world get too polarized and we start to think that one is the bad guys and one is the good guys. Here is an instance where that mind set does not work! Let's combine the two: Get the vaccine and keep caring for your health in a natural way. That's what I mean by middle ground!Stephanie Raffelock
President
www.soundformulas.com

[Bob Sager MD]

Stephanie - thank you very much for your comments. I totally agree - we need a combined view of how to fight this menace rather than a fixed conventional one. Having had one patient almost die in my office of H1N1 within 24 hrs of getting it (she had asthma) I have a healthy respect for what it can to us.
drBob