80,000 swine flu jabs may be cancelled

A third batch of swine flu vaccines was expected to arrive last night as the authorities are considering cancelling the remaining jabs on order.

According to a spokesman for the Community Care Parliamentary Secretariat, the health authorities are expected to decide whether to try to cancel the remaining 80,000 jabs in the coming weeks.

Although Malta ordered 425,000 vaccines, the take-up has been low, with only 81,500 having taken the jab by Tuesday evening.

Moreover, the authorities recently decided that children did not need two doses, as originally thought, which should leave Malta with even more unused jabs.

Asked whether the two factors had prompted the government to consider cancelling jabs that had still not arrived, the spokesman said they had, although Malta was obliged to take the whole lot.

Malta had bought the doses of the H1N1 jab from British pharmaceutical company GSK in December for between €3 and €3.5 million. The first batch of 100,000 arrived at the end of last year and a second batch of another 100,000 arrived last month.

The news that the authorities are considering trying to cancel the remaining vaccines comes as the World Health Organisation's decision to declare a pandemic came under scrutiny. Wolfgang Wodarg, head of health at the Council of Europe, has accused WHO of faking the pandemic, an accusation that has been rejected by the organisation.

Experts have backed the WHO's decision to declare a pandemic in June. Speaking to The Times, Martin Meltzer, senior health economist at America's Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, said H1N1 was "unequivocally" a pandemic.

"In the US, the rate of deaths among children was approximately five times that seen in non-pandemic years," he said.

Although the death rate among over 65-year-olds who contracted swine flu was at least eight times higher than the average rate taken over 22 influenza seasons, there were low attack rates among the elderly.

"We experienced a wave of influenza illness caused by human-adapted influenza strain that had never previously been documented. The new strain was efficiently transmitted from person to person and caused notable increases in deaths and hospitalisations, among under 65-year-olds. That is sufficient to merit the label 'influenza pandemic'," Dr Meltzer said.