An editorial in today's Globe and Mail, responding to the study mentioned here yesterday: The H1N1 program was an injection of good sense. Excerpt:
The study says Ontario could have seen an additional 420 hospitalizations, 28,000 visits to hospital emergency departments and 100,000 visits to doctors’ offices if the province had not offered the flu shot program.
Suddenly, the $180-million cost is not an outrage to the public finances, but a very sensible expenditure. Not only were many spared severe illness, and some lives saved, but workplace productivity was preserved, and the decision to vaccinate proved “highly cost-effective despite the high program cost.”
Canada’s public health officials need to learn from their mistakes; the lethargic approval process and tardy roll-out of the vaccine, even for the prioritized high-risk groups; the mysterious decision to keep older children off the list of high-risk groups; a costly and confusing top-down communications strategy that alternated between a don’t-worry-be-happy approach and breathless declamations of impending doom.
The fact remains, though, that H1N1 could well have proved to be a much more serious disease that it did, and even knowing what we know now, the decision to pursue a national mass immunization program was the correct one.Globe and Mail reporter Caroline Alphonso, who covered H1N1 last year, also has a follow-up report on the Ontario study.