“How do I know it is safe?”

That is the issue which will influence how many Americans get the pandemic influenza vaccine.

The U.S. government has several goals in responding to the pandemic, the wire service full story says.

• An “unprecedented effort” to track side effects which are a response to the vaccine and not coincidence.
• An unprecedented goal of vaccinating 50% of the population in a tight time frame, in time for people to develop immunity.
• According to U.S. News and World Report, the 2009 population will be, by year’s end, around 305,529,237 people. A new baby is born every second, the magazine’s statistics show.
• The goal of vaccinating 50% of the population means  that152,882,309 people have to get the shot or the nasal spray, which is one-third more shot-takers than the 100,000,000 who do in a normal seasonal flu season and they need to do so faster.
  

Associated Press

…”The government is starting an unprecedented system to track possible side effects as mass flu vaccinations begin next month. The idea is to detect any rare but real problems quickly, and explain the inevitable coincidences that are sure to cause some false alarms.

“Every day, bad things happen to people. When you vaccinate a lot of people in a short period of time, some of those things are going to happen to some people by chance alone,” said Dr. Daniel Salmon, a vaccine safety specialist at the Department of Health and Human Services.

“Health authorities hope to vaccinate well over half the population in just a few months against swine flu, which doctors call the 2009 H1N1 strain. That would be a feat. No more than 100 million Americans usually get vaccinated against regular winter flu, and never in such a short period.”

Source: Associated Press, September 27, 2009