Our medical office received directive from Blue Cross that we were being encouraged to NOT USE Wyeth's intranasal vaccine for influenza because of COST.
The gov't needs to intercede when greed overtakes sound public health policy.
Vaccinating 75% of the US population should be goal of each year's influenza campaign.
Only producing enough vaccine for 25% of the population is totally inadequate.
Regarding the unused dosages, that is the fault of the manufacturers for not moving inventory to the clinic site appropriately.
It is also the fault of the insurance companies who choose to PREVENT distribution through letters such as the one we got from Blue Cross.
I agree that getting ppl innoculated at a high of rate as possible is an admiral goal.... I think it's just smart as an individual to take the precaution if it's available...
I read somewhere that there were some 80 million doses manufactured in a normal year there are some 70-75 million doses used... I maybe wrong on those numbers as I'm going from memory. The point being making more doeses doesn't do any good if ppl don't use them. This year more may have been used because of the scare.....
I am not a Dr. and am not going to comment at all on the effectiveness of the flu shot, but I do need to question how you think that the Government should be responsible for vaccinating 75% of the population?
I worked in a Primary Care clinic for many years. For four of those years I was responsible for determining the amount of vaccines to order.
What most people don't realize is that we were generally required to order our vaccines for the year in April. This was done because the pharmaceutical companies needed to approximate how many vaccines to produce.
Every year I would take the last years vaccination rates and increase it by a slight amount. In all of the years I worked in the clinic, we only ran out of vaccine once. We were, in that case, able to get more vaccines from another clinic. Every other year we ended up throwing away vaccines because they sat unused. Our Physicians asked every patient if they would like a vaccine. Except for the year that we ran out, we never turned away a patient.
BTW, my clinic was owned by a company that also owned an HMO, and not once did I ever, ever, ever have that insurance company send out a memo asking us not to offer the vaccine, in fact that HMO routinely sent out letters reminding patients that it was flu shot time, and that they would cover the vaccine 100%.
I just don't see how the lack of vaccines this one year is the governments fault.