In particular, many of the families of those who died may have had no intention of getting vaccinated.
And even if they did, the probability of dying from H1N1 is very low anyway.
Finally, many of those families are probably also at fault for not seeking treatment quickly enough after flu symptoms appeared.
Please stop using hn as a sounding board for every half-baked random notion that pops into your head. I'm not sure that you really even care about what you're posting.
For example: months ago, you asked if it was possible to "stop all mutations in the human genome" (approximately). I wrote a reply in the time that I had, but felt bad that it was incomplete. So a few months later, I spent a few hours detailing particular molecular mechanisms by which mutations are found and removed. I sent it to you via email; you never replied.
Now you're posting about H1N1. If I spent time writing something intelligent back, I don't think it would matter.
Maybe you are not doing it intentionally, but what you are doing is indistinguishable from trolling.
The real question is why any of this exists in the first place? Does the patent system really incentivise the creation of technology? Does the FDA really protect the public? How should this effect drugs that the government and tax payers actually pay (if in part) to develop?
With Tamiflu, used to treat H1N1 and other serious flu, there is a company in India that produces a "generic" and could fill the gap in demand. Their generic version has been cleared by the WHO, but due to US patents, cannot be distributed to the US or its trade partners. The same holds true to many "life-saving" drugs, such as HIV/AIDS cocktails.
I am not saying that so called "big pharma" is evil or that there is some social justice demanded, I do not think that to be the case, just that the whole system in the US and other countries suffers from serious fundamental issues. To justify suing someone, there must be a claim of wrong doing on account of a specific party. Who is really responsible for the shortage of N1H1 vaccine? I would say we all are...
That's just one of the many suspicious circumstances surrounding the untried vaccines & the program to inoculate everyone.
The real question is: Why are we getting vaccines for this flu? It's a lot less deadly than previous seasonal flus. Why the concern?
Because it is a highly contagious virus that might mutate into something more deadly.
Actually, there is no evidence to support the claim that it is less deadly than previous seasonal flus and several bits of research that suggest it might be a bit more deadly than we thought. The first pass of this flu early in the year included some really, really bad reporting out of Mexico that at first made it appear to be the second coming of the 1918 flu and then made it look like a very mild flu strain.
So far, what we know is that it spreads very quickly because the general population has very few antibodies that can defend against it. In its current form it is not significantly more deadly than seasonal flu, but its mortality profile is a little different. It is leading to more pneumonia than most seasonal flus and it is also tending to kill more young people than standard seasonal flu, which usually kills the very young and very old but seldom kills people between those two extremes.
Given the rate at which flu mutates (and the possibility that this flu could pick up a particularly nasty mutation) and the lack of any significant herd immunity in the general population it is prudent to prepare for the worst and also to get as many people vaccinated as possible.
Cite? I was under the impression that it was about as dangerous as others.
If that were true (and I'm not sure it is), we have vaccines for the seasonal flu every year...
And that's ignoring the "it might mutate into something killer" issue.