The Procrastination Station

Canada was told to stop using a batch of swine flu vaccines. They also declined to say how many doses have already been administered.

Let’s take a look at the numbers:
- The batch contains 170,000 doses.
- 1 in 20,000 get anaphylactic reactions. 5x higher than the 1 in 100,000 that was expected.

Logic tells us that they need to administer at least 100,000 doses before they can figure out the 5x reaction rate. For the people that don’t believe me, here is an example:
- 20,000 injections, 1 reaction: “Now we expect the other 80,000 injections to go smoothly.”
- 50,000 injections, 3 reactions: “Something might be wrong, but is the reaction rate 6x what it should be?”
- 80,000 injections, 3 reactions: “Ok, nothing is wrong and the 2 extra cases were just unlucky”
- 100,000 injections, 5 reactions: “Darn, 2 cases might be a fluke but we can’t pull that off with 4 cases.”

Why can’t we know how many doses were already used? It seems like it should be public knowledge! There’s no shame in telling us that more than half the batch has already been administered. But how safe is a vaccine if they are at least 500% off their reaction rate guess? Note that 5 years down the road, they might find out that the vaccinated patients have an increased rate of…cancer.

My Vaccine Herding Solution
I’ll call this the “vaccine herding solution.” Simply put, you encourage all the sheep to take the vaccine as quickly as possible, while avoiding it yourself. Once the majority of people are vaccinated, they cannot carry the swine flu virus anymore and your chances of catching it are minimal. And if you were so unlucky to still catch it, what are your chances of dying from the swine flu?…probably less than your chances of dying from a coconut falling and hitting your head.

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