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Vaccine wanted, hard to find
Just one in three Americans able to get H1N1 protection for their children
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Published: November 7, 2009
WASHINGTON
About 40 percent of American parents have tried to get their children vaccinated against the H1N1 flu virus, but only one in three have been successful, according to a survey released yesterday. High-risk adults looking for the vaccine for themselves were just as unlucky finding it.
At the same time, about half of adults continue to express little interest in the vaccine now or later.
The survey by the Harvard School of Public Heath sketches an American population split between people who are frustrated because they can't find the vaccine, and those who say they don't want it even when it arrives.
Both groups present major challenges to public health -- one to satisfy and the other to convince.
Production of vaccine against the novel H1N1 flu strain is going much more slowly than anticipated because the virus grows so slowly. As of yesterday, there were 38 million doses available, which was an increase of 11 million over a week ago. Next week, about 8 million more doses will arrive, said Anne Schuchat, a physician and epidemiologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The federal government, which is buying all the pandemic vaccine and then distributing it to state and city health departments, has ordered 250 million doses from the manufacturers.
The brightest spot in the survey was the finding that 92 percent of the people who have unsuccessfully sought vaccination say they will try again. At a media briefing yesterday, Schuchat said she was heartened by that statistic.
"They weren't giving up. They recognize the value of trying to protect themselves with vaccine and sticking with it through the next several weeks," she said.
Healthy children are getting a vaccination at about twice the rate of chronically ill adults, even though both are among the five priority groups targeted for early vaccination.
In the survey, conducted by phone on Oct. 30, 31 and Nov. 1, 41 percent of people with children under age 18 had sought vaccine for the children, but only one-third of them had found it. Twenty-one percent of high-priority adults had sought it, and one-third had found it.
Two-thirds of the parents who weren't able to get their children vaccinated described themselves as "frustrated."
At the other end of the spectrum, however, were adults who hadn't been vaccinated at the time the surveyors called. Sixty-two percent of them said they "will not try" to get vaccinated later on.
Of the people who said they had tried to get information about where they might get vaccinated, 49 said they couldn't find an answer.
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