No Pizza Night for the UnVaccinated

There appears to be no shortage of people (many of my friends and acquaintances included) who say they have no intention of getting the H1N1 flu vaccination this season.

This just makes me sigh and roll my eyes. You know, I can appreciate healthy skepticism. It’s kind of what I do for a living. But this whole business of refusing to get inoculated is just ill-informed, and based on some vague notion that “The Government” isn’t telling people everything they need to know.

That is, without question, “The Government” ’s fault, because, as a general rule, they don’t tell us everything we need to know.

Unfortunately, that long history of less-than-honesty means that a lot of people who could easily avoid getting sick are going to get sick. And if that just involved those other people, I’d be fine with it.

But I’m not worried about them. I’m worried about the people who can’t afford to be infected by the people who don’t think they need to protect themselves from the virus. People like – I’ll say it – me. Not everyone has cushy jobs with sick pay, you know.

So listen: I am putting this out there. There will be no dinner invitations to my house for friends who refuse to get immunized. It’s as simple as that. I’ll see you next spring, and you can let me know how your whole “influenza libertarian” strategy worked out for you.

In the meantime, I’ll try to explode a few myths for you:

1. “I think the “pandemic” is overblown and it’s not going to affect me.” The reality is that, unlike all the other flu viruses you’ve been in constant contact with over the years, this is a flu strain that most people under 65 have never been exposed to, so people in this age group have no innate immunity. The Public Health Agency of Canada predicts that without interventions like vaccines and antivirals, close to 25 to 35 per cent of the population could become ill.

2. “Even if I do get sick, I’m young and healthy, so no big deal.” A study released a few weeks ago by the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that, among those Canadian patients who ended up hospitalized with H1N1 (and these were predominantly young patients with few major health issues), critical illness occurred rapidly, with 81 percent of those studied going into shock and multi-organ failure. Those patients received mechanical ventilation for a median duration of 12 days.

3. “Because the vaccine is new, I don’t believe it’s safe.” The requirements for vaccines approved for sale in Canada are strict and every vaccine lot is safety-tested by Health Canada. We’re not living in Bora Bora, here. If it’s the adjuvant you’re worried about, the PHAC website points out that the use of an adjuvanted vaccine is not new. The adjuvant used in the H1N1 flu vaccine has been widely used in Europe in other vaccines for over 12 years. The dangers posed by this preventable influenza are much greater than the risk of a serious reaction to the vaccine – which is about one for every million shots administered.

So if you’re not worried about yourself, try to think about all the other people you might infect when you do get sick, and imagine the social impact that illness in one third of the population would have.
If you’re not part of the solution here, you’re part of the problem.

And there will be no pizza night at my house for you.