Mass vaccination may offer the Government little protection, says robert matthews
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Bird flu is giving a whole new meaning to the concept of headless chickens. The mere mention of it triggers panic among ministers fearing that most terrible of fates: death by tabloid headline. Only a government fretting about its media image could possibly allow its chief medical officer to declare that Britain will be hit by a bird flu pandemic - sometime. Why not go the whole hog, and announce that the end of the world is coming - sometime?
Altogether more disturbing is the Department of Health's pledge to buy enough flu vaccine to cover the entire UK. This is media-driven policy at its most ludicrous. Not even the World Health Organisation has suggested such blanket coverage, believing instead that the most effective approach is vigilance and targeted treatment. Yet this is unlikely to placate leader writers just waiting
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| The deaths of barely 70 people on a planet of six billion has been enough to trigger global action |
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to rail about all those grannies "left to die by heartless docs".
The government needs to wake up to the fact that mass vaccination offers no
protection against bad headlines. Quite the opposite: treatments that are deemed statistically safe can produce thousands
of deaths when administered to whole nations, as those "negligible" one-in-10,000 rates of side-effects are multiplied by tens of millions of doses.
Lurking behind the government's approach to bird flu is the shadow of mad cow disease, where ministers handed out reassurances on the basis of little data and less insight. Bird flu is an entirely different matter: the deaths of barely 70 people on a planet of six billion has been enough to trigger global action. Such vigilance allowed even very poor nations like Vietnam to see off the recent SARS epidemic using simple measures like travel restrictions (there's still no proper vaccine). And in any case, no-one should lose sight of the fact that those most at risk from bird flu are still, well, birds. 
FIRST POSTED OCTOBER 20
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