Vaccination campaigns - current status
Canada: Experts call for end of vaccination programVia the Ottawa Citizen: Experts call for end of vaccination program. Excerpt:
The drop in cases suggests Canada has hit the critical fraction of the population that needs to be vaccinated to control the pandemic, says Dr. David Fisman, a University of Toronto expert in infectious disease dynamics.
Fisman can't understand the rationale for continuing mass vaccinations. He said that for a virus as contagious as H1N1, less than 30 per cent of the population needed vaccination to reach a critical level of immunity.
"I'm sure that the vaccine has prevented some deaths. I'm sure that there are people who are alive right now who would not have been alive if we hadn't vaccinated," he says.
But the pandemic was already peaking, and then subsiding before the vaccination was rolling out in force.
"That's nobody's fault, that's just how long it took to make a vaccine against a brand new virus. Those were the cards we were dealt," says Fisman, an associate professor of infectious diseases epidemiology at the university.
Despite that view, Canada's top doctor this week pleaded with Canadians to get vaccinated if they have not already done so. Chief public health officer David Butler-Jones said that, while 30 per cent of the population is now immune to H1N1, either because they have been vaccinated or because they have already been infected, "millions" of people are still at risk of infection.
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