

When people die of H1N1, can vaccine companies be sued due to shortage? - amichail

Or is the link sufficiently weak that this would not make a strong case?<p>In particular, many of the families of those who died may have had no intention of getting vaccinated.<p>And even if they did, the probability of dying from H1N1 is very low anyway.<p>Finally, many of those families are probably also at fault for not seeking treatment quickly enough after flu symptoms appeared.
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maxharris
Your posts are hurting this community.

Please stop using hn as a sounding board for every half-baked random notion
that pops into your head. I'm not sure that you really even care about what
you're posting.

For example: months ago, you asked if it was possible to "stop all mutations
in the human genome" (approximately). I wrote a reply in the time that I had,
but felt bad that it was incomplete. So a few months later, I spent a few
_hours_ detailing particular molecular mechanisms by which mutations are found
and removed. I sent it to you via email; you never replied.

Now you're posting about H1N1. If I spent time writing something intelligent
back, I don't think it would matter.

Maybe you are not doing it intentionally, but what you are doing is
indistinguishable from trolling.

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amichail
Your email reply is certainly worth a post here. Why don't you post it? Or if
you like, I could post it indicating that it was your reply?

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bdfh42
How inane. How can getting sick and dying of an airborne flue be someone's
fault? For goodness sake - the world is not designed to compensate you for bad
fortune - at best it is there to offer you the challenges that make life worth
living.

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towndrunk
Exactly!

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jlujan
It is an interesting concept but a dangerous one. It cuts at the heart of the
conflict between the USPTO, the FDA, NIHS and "big pharma". Drug companies
sink mil/billions into developing drugs with the incentive of revenue
guarantees from drug patents. However, most big "breakthrough" drugs are
heavily funded by the NIHS (other government grants) and therefore... tax
payer money. The FDA, instituted to protect the public, is heavily backlogged
and drags their feet approving a new drug. Usually, by the time the FDA
approves a drug, the patent holder has limited amount of time to make up
development costs before the market is flooded with generics.

The real question is why any of this exists in the first place? Does the
patent system really incentivise the creation of technology? Does the FDA
really protect the public? How should this effect drugs that the government
and tax payers actually pay (if in part) to develop?

With Tamiflu, used to treat H1N1 and other serious flu, there is a company in
India that produces a "generic" and could fill the gap in demand. Their
generic version has been cleared by the WHO, but due to US patents, cannot be
distributed to the US or its trade partners. The same holds true to many
"life-saving" drugs, such as HIV/AIDS cocktails.

I am not saying that so called "big pharma" is evil or that there is some
social justice demanded, I do not think that to be the case, just that the
whole system in the US and other countries suffers from serious fundamental
issues. To justify suing someone, there must be a claim of wrong doing on
account of a specific party. Who is really responsible for the shortage of
N1H1 vaccine? I would say we all are...

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cpr
Are you not aware that the US Government has officially indemnified (made safe
from lawsuits) both all federal lawmakers and the H1N1 vaccine suppliers?

That's just one of the many suspicious circumstances surrounding the untried
vaccines & the program to inoculate everyone.

The real question is: Why are we getting vaccines for this flu? It's a lot
less deadly than previous seasonal flus. Why the concern?

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evgen
> The real question is: Why are we getting vaccines for this flu? It's a lot
> less deadly than previous seasonal flus. Why the concern?

Actually, there is no evidence to support the claim that it is less deadly
than previous seasonal flus and several bits of research that suggest it might
be a bit more deadly than we thought. The first pass of this flu early in the
year included some really, really bad reporting out of Mexico that at first
made it appear to be the second coming of the 1918 flu and then made it look
like a very mild flu strain.

So far, what we know is that it spreads very quickly because the general
population has very few antibodies that can defend against it. In its current
form it is not significantly more deadly than seasonal flu, but its mortality
profile is a little different. It is leading to more pneumonia than most
seasonal flus and it is also tending to kill more young people than standard
seasonal flu, which usually kills the very young and very old but seldom kills
people between those two extremes.

Given the rate at which flu mutates (and the possibility that this flu could
pick up a particularly nasty mutation) and the lack of any significant herd
immunity in the general population it is prudent to prepare for the worst and
also to get as many people vaccinated as possible.

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dgordon
Apparently, some of the difference in mortality profile is because there
hasn't been a major H1N1 flu in quite a while, so older people have some
immunity to H1N1 that younger people don't have because their immune systems
have never faced such a virus.

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evgen
From what I had read (a New Scientist synopsis of a Univ of Wisconsin study,
so my facts may be muddled) it was exposure to the 1918 pandemic that provided
H1N1 antibody response. Since that flu variant lasted until 1920 we are
talking about people who are at a minimum 89 years old. This is not a large
enough cohort to appreciably tilt the mortality profile on its own, there is
something else at work here as well.

