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in the meantime they are over manufacturing the shot we'll most likely never need and $$$ will be thrown in the trash

Sigh. Yes, you're exactly right - most likely the bird flu will be either

(1) A non-event - never making it to the point of a widely-transmissible virus, in which case the effort put into making the vaccine will be wasted, or

(2) a mutated version of the virus against which all our current vaccines will be useless.

Your tax dollars at work again, unfortunately. :-(

How effective are flu shots?

SNIP:Two years ago, for example,the flu shot protected nearly half the healthy adults who got it. But only 38 percent of those at high risk because of chronic illness were protected by the immunization. This was due in part to the fact that the vaccine that year was not a close match for the dominant strain of influenza.

But even in years when the vaccine matches the various types of flu virus circulating in the community, immunization for the elderly may not be as effective as most people think. A study of mortality records for the past three decades shows that death rates from the flu among older people have not changed much during that time. Over the same period, there was a dramatic increase in the rate of flu vaccination, from 15 percent to 65 percent. The investigators concluded that flu shots do not protect this vulnerable population particularly well (Archives of Internal Medicine, Feb. 14, 2005).

A systematic review of many studies of flu-vaccine effectiveness suggests that vaccinating elderly people in nursing homes is about 23 percent effective in protecting them from flu-like illness (The Lancet, Oct. 1, 2005). According to the researchers, "In elderly individuals living in the community, vaccines were not significantly effective against influenza, influenza-like illness, or pneumonia"