Confusion spreading over the flu vaccine
Some of this may be repeated from other sections of the media, who are also getting it wrong.
Every year the seasonal influenza vaccine is produced in response to the strains of flu circulating. Doing so for the current pandemic, H1N1, is nothing new on that account. Doing anything else wouldn't work at all well.
The vaccine has not yet been produced, therefore whatever bad things may have happened to people already, they have not been caused by the coming influenza vaccine.
Oseltamivir (tradename Tamiflu) has been disappointing, and the nausea produced in children no longer seems to make it worth prescribing to most.
Confusing Tamiflu — a tablet drug treatment — with an injected vaccine is presumably easy to do if you don't really understand what you are talking about. Perhaps that would be a good time to make quiet enquiries rather than broadcast confusion.
Adrian Midgley
GP, Exeter
(by email)
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