Your government at work

Apparently, those 800,000 doses of H1N1 flu vaccine were recalled not because they posed any danger, but rather because they apparently weren't quite strong enough.

So instead of providing partial protection to 800,000 people, or increasing the dosage and providing good protection to 500,000 people, the government decided that 800,000 people would go without protection at all--and their neighbors would also be more exposed.

Their neighbors, you ask? Yes. Remember that a vaccine doesn't work primarily by protecting you from a disease, but rather by reducing the chance that you'll pass the disease on to others. If each infected person infects more than one person on average, you have an epidemic. If they infect less than one person, the disease fizzles out quickly. So even a "weak" vaccine can provide substantial protection and confer a degree of "herd immunity."

"Kudos" to the "experts" in Washington for forgetting the most basic principle of vaccines. Hopefully it doesn't have catastrophic consequences, but this is definitely something you want to consider when you ask yourself "how much influence do I want government to have in medicine?" For me, the answer is rapidly approaching a perfectly round number. 0.