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Everybody panic! It's the H1N1 über-lethal supermegavirus plague! Actually, it's just the regular ol' flu, but simply a mutation that is infecting more people because most of us don't have sufficient built-in immunity for it. And while health authorities started the flu season wondering how they were going to convince people to get themselves vaccinated, the tragic death of twelve-year-old Evan Frustaglio may have been the tipping point that immediately clogged clinics and depleted vaccine supplies. Though enough vaccine is being produced, the bottleneck is in getting the vials filled and shipped quick enough, as well as prioritizing people in higher-risk demographics. Meanwhile, as all of this is going on, corporate executives are paying $2,300 each to step to the front of the line at Toronto's private Medcan Clinic, according to the Star. With three thousand doses of the H1N1 vaccine shipped to Medcan so far, these corporate clients are getting the shot as part of their "enhanced annual checkups," immediately, in the comfort of a warm doctor's office instead of waiting hours in a line with the commoners. Pay-for-privilege bypasses Ontario's single-tier health care laws for procedures considered "medically unnecessary," in the same way Ontarians can pony-up $500 for a quickie MRI across the border in Buffalo.
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Generally speaking I don't have a problem with users paying to get quicker access to medical care (as opposed to the usual Canadian method of using personal contacts) provided it doesn't pull resources out of the taxpayer funded system. Like say, using up a limited supply of flu vaccine that could be going to people in high-risk groups.
I'm a bit surprised that Torontoist is buying into the media line of the public authorities that the death of twelve-year-old Evan Frustaglio was some sort of "tipping point".
Sure, opinion polls showed that many Canadians were not planning to get the shot, or were unsure about getting it, but we don't know how frantic the remainder of the population (especially high-risk groups) was to get the shot, or how many planned to go to the clinics as soon as they opened. Even if only 5% of the population was anxious enough to show up during the first week, that would have been enough to cause the chaos we witnessed. Even had that poor boy not died, we still had only a handful of poorly organized clinics, and there is absolutely no way of knowing that the everything would have gone more smoothly.
Moreover, health authorities have repeated numerous times in the media that they simply couldn't have anticipated the death of Evan Frustaglio. Really? Scores of people have died from H1N1 in Canada, and they couldn't have foreseen that another death would have occurred around the time that the vaccine became available and that the media would have focused given it a high profile? Were the public health authorities wilfully blind? It's quite disappointing that the public health authorities at all levels seem to be hiding behind Evan Frustaglio.
To say that Evan Frustaglio's death was a tipping point is, at best, really speculative. Anecdotal evidence suggests that it contributed to the chaos, but we can't say that we would have avoided chaos had the death not occurred.
Some doctor's offices are carrying the vaccine. My sister is in the priority group; she got her shot the other day and only had to wait 10 minutes or so. It was the middle of the day and she probably lucked out in her timing, but there was no line going down the block or anything. This was in Mississauga though.
In related news, after a protracted bidding war Rogers won out over Scotiabank for naming rights to the deadly plague: for the next five years it shall be known as the Rogers H1N1 Flu until such time as the contract comes under review.
If Rogers won the rights, wouldn't they choose to call it "Bel/lus H1N1 influenza," or "WIND-up-dead"?