Swine Flu Watch: Is it time to stop mass vaccinations?
H1N1 pandemic ending with a whimper, not a bang
With H1N1 poised to enter history as the least deadly of four global flu pandemics, some experts are calling for an end to Canada’s mass vaccination program.
Nature is already achieving what we would hope to achieve by vaccinating, they say.
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The drop in cases suggests Canada has hit the critical fraction of the population that needs to be vaccinated to control the pandemic, says Dr. David Fisman, a University of Toronto expert in infectious disease dynamics.
Fisman can’t understand the rational for continuing mass vaccinations. He said that for a virus as contagious as H1N1, fewer than 30 per cent of the population needed vaccination to reach a critical level of immunity.
“I’m sure that the vaccine has prevented some deaths. I’m sure that there are people who are alive right now who would not have been alive if we hadn’t vaccinated,” he says. But the pandemic was already peaking, and then subsiding before the vaccination was rolling out in force.
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