New York City to Start Vaccinations for Swine Flu in Schools (449 hits)
Despite nationwide shortfalls in the supply of swine flu vaccine, New York City’s health commissioner said on Monday that the city was going ahead with the first stage of its plan to vaccinate schoolchildren. School nurses will begin giving free vaccinations on Wednesday at 125 small public elementary schools, all with fewer than 400 students, said the commissioner, Dr. Thomas A. Farley.
“We have 40,000 doses set aside for the first wave of schools, which we feel should be adequate,” Dr. Farley said. He said nurses would probably vaccinate 15 to 25 children a day until the supply was exhausted. The order in which schools will receive the vaccine can be found on the city’s flu Web site. Dr. Farley said that as of last week, the city had received about 300,000 of the 380,000 doses of H1N1 vaccine it had ordered, which are being distributed to private physicians, hospitals, public clinics and schools...
New York City has seen very little swine flu activity this fall, after being perhaps the worst-hit city in the nation when the virus appeared last spring, Dr. Farley said. Immunologists attribute the absence of flu activity to immunity built up in a large portion of the city’s population. But Dr. Farley said that even New Yorkers who thought they had been infected with swine flu in the spring should get the vaccine, because absent testing, they may have actually had some other type of respiratory illness, and because “the vaccine does no harm.”
