By ANDREW W. GRIFFIN
Oklahoma Watchdog, editor
Posted: July 7, 2010
andrew@oklahomawatchdog.org
OKLAHOMA CITY — It has been many months since the hype over the H1N1 virus – swine flu – died down. As Oklahoma Watchdog reported last fall, side effects were reported by those who took the swine flu vaccine and the hype has now been considered to be overblown since there was no serious pandemic as many feared. We also reported on swine-flu vaccine testing on human subjects here in Oklahoma as well, at Oklahoma City’s IPS Research.
“In Oklahoma, the pandemic is officially over,” said Vicki Monks, spokeswoman for the Oklahoma City-County Health Department. “We still have vaccine. We are still willing to vaccinate people. Sporadic cases are likely to continue through the summer. Cases are circulating through the Southern hemisphere.”
Monks told Oklahoma Watchdog that all but a few doses of H1N1 vaccine remain in Oklahoma. The rest have already expired and have been destroyed.
“We are still offering those,” she said of the remaining, unexpired H1N1 vaccine.
One interesting note Monks mentioned was that this fall the regular flu vaccine and the H1N1 vaccine will be combined into one. There were three different strains of influenza that circulated in the past year and one of them was the H1N1 strain, although not the one that caused the pandemic scare in 2009. Monks said she is working on a press release that will go out to the public in the next week or so.
Swine flu also appears to be on the mind of the editors at The Oklahoman. On their editorial page today, they addressed last year’s overreaction to the swine flu headlined: “Pro-active course helped keep H1N1 virus in check – Pandemic didn’t live up to billing in Oklahoma.”
Opines the Oke: “Oklahoma fared relatively well in the latest swine flu scare, despite having a vaccination rate lower than the national average. Perhaps we’re too inured to dire weather warnings to take a pandemic prediction as seriously as we should.”
Or perhaps we’re skeptical of being jabbed with vaccines that contain all manner of nasty ingredients ranging from mercury-laced thimerosal to formaldehyde.
