There are people with complications of flu in intensive care and much publicity; many people seem very anxious to pay for a flu vaccination privately if they don’t fall into the NHS’ ‘at risk’ categories. The chair of the RCGP has called for healthy people not to be given flu vaccination in order to save supplies for at risk groups.

But the bigger question is about the effectiveness of flu vaccine at all. We spend a vast amount of resources on giving it out but little in high qualtity research of the effects of it. See Cochrane. Last year we had a fantastic opportunity in only using H1N1 vaccination as part of a study group in order to get good evidence about the effects of it: that opportunity was badly missed.