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H1N1 vaccine deaths
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It's a harsh truth that there will almost certainly be H1N1 vaccine deaths.
There are concerns that the H1N1 vaccine against the swine flu epidemic might cause deaths: given the number of people that it is intended to vaccinate this fear is almost certainly true. For this is something that, within medicine at least, is generally acknowledged but not really more widely understood. That any mass program of vaccination will lead directly to deaths.
However, so again will an epidemic of the diseases that we vaccinate against also lead to deaths. The calculation is that the vaccinations will cause fewer deaths than the epidemic of the disease. This isn't an exact science unfortunately, for it depends upon things that we not only don't know but upon things that we cannot know. Crucially, how bad will the epidemic be without the vaccination program?
Back in 1976 we think that we got it wrong: there was a likely flu epidemic and a vaccine was rushed into use. The known deaths from the vaccination program were around 45: but the epidemic itself (by no means were all of the population vaccinated) didn't seem to kill more than the normal number who die every winter from flu anyway, vaccinated or not.
Have we got it wrong this time with the H1N1 vaccine? We simply don't know. If the expected epidemic doesn't happen then it is possible that more will die from the vaccine than would die without it. It's also possible that the epidemic will not be of a serious form of the disease: the death rate from this version of influenza seems no higher than the common forms which rage through the population each winter: but there's nothing to say that this will remain the case.
It is, sadly, simply one of Donald Rumsfeld's "unknowns".
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