Seven out of 396 students at Public School 40 in Brooklyn, New York received A/H1N1 flu vaccine shots on Monday, becoming the first recipients of the new flu vaccine in a highly-publicized vaccination campaign that began in a few states but will soon gain momentum across the United States.

"In the pilot, we have six schools participating," Dr. Jane Zucker, Assistant Commissioner of the Bureau of Immunization for the New York City Health Department, told Xinhua at the Brooklyn school, which was one of the first local schools selected for the pilot.

Some 700 students from New York public schools will receive A/H1N1 flu vaccine injections in the next seven days.

Biggest ever vaccination campaign

In Marion County, Indiana, and at Le Bonheur Children's Medical Center in Memphis, Tennessee, about 100 doctors and health workers on each site on Monday received Flu Mist, a nasal spray vaccine.

Local TV news footage showed that Indiana's first dose was administered to Dr. Charles Miramonti, an emergency room physician at Wishard Memorial Hospital in Indianapolis. He was given the FluMist vaccine in front of a bank of television cameras at an event attended by Governor Mitch Daniels.

Marion County received a shipment of 5,200 doses of the H1N1 flu vaccine, which will be split among the county's hospitals.

The Memphis medical center had witnessed three children die from the novel flu virus since it was first detected in April and quickly evolved into a global pandemic.

Monday's vaccinations marked the beginning of a nationwide campaign to inoculate at least half the US population -- and perhaps the entire country -- against the new A/H1N1 virus that has caused the first influenza pandemic in 41 years.

The US federal government has spent 2 billion dollars purchasing about 250 million doses of vaccine, and has pledged to buy enough to immunize every American if there is enough demand.

States began ordering vaccine last week, and about 7 million doses are expected to be available by the end of this week. About 40 million doses of nasal spray and injectable vaccine will be available by the middle of the month, with another 10 million to 20 million to become available every week after that.

Medical staff go first

Following months of preparations and promises, doctors, nurses and other health-care workers in the states of Indiana and Tennessee were among the first Americans to receive doses of A/H1N1 flu vaccine on Monday, as the US government launched the most ambitious vaccination campaign in history.

Initial shipments of the Flu Mist vaccine are so small that in most cases they're being reserved for health workers to guarantee they remain healthy enough to care for and vaccinate others, said Bill Hall, spokesman for the US Health and Human Services Department last week.

Healthcare workers, pregnant women and people with special health conditions including heart disease and diabetes are reportedly among the 160 million people the US Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has said should be the first in line to get the vaccine.

As for school children, parents seem to be worried that A/H1N1 flu is going to be more serious in fall as compared with that in spring.

A survey showed that 75 percent of parents planned to get their children vaccinated against H1N1.

According to the CDC, about 40 percent of young children aged 2to 4 are usually vaccinated against influenza.

The picture is complicated by seasonal flu vaccination, which started last month. Officials say people need both vaccinations to be protected from both seasonal flu and the pandemic H1N1 strain.

Varied attitudes

The CDC chief, Thomas Frieden, has said the A/H1N1 vaccine is more effective than some seasonal shots because the new virus hasn't mutated and matches the vaccine.

However, only 53 percent of adults said they plan to get vaccinated, with 41 percent saying they won't and six percent saying they're not sure, according to a telephone poll of 1,042 people conducted by Harvard University School of Public Health from September 14 to September 20.

Eugene Ferrerll, an 11th-grade student at Public School 40 of New York, told Xinhua on Monday that he does not want to "get sick," so he will definitely have a shot if "it is free." "We are going to have one. But it's not serious. It's kind of sickness that people have to deal with," he added.

Around-the-clock work for vaccine

The vaccine will reportedly trickle in at a rate of about 20 million doses a week, and officials are unsure how many Americans will actually get them. The US government is providing them for free, but clinics and retailers may charge to administer them.

Inoculations won't gear up in earnest until mid-October, when at least 40 million doses against what scientists call the 2009 H1N1 flu will have rolled out, with more arriving each week after that.

The U.S. government has ordered about 250 million doses from five companies, namely Sanofi-Aventis SA, CSL Ltd., Novartis AG, GlaxoSmithKline and MedImmune.

Some officials predicted that an ample supply of the injectable form will be available by mid-October.

CDC Spokesman Jay Butler has told reporters that there will be enough supply of vaccine for anyone who wants it. He said vaccine makers will ship 10 million to 20 million doses per week over the next couple of months.

As some people are worried about the safety of the vaccine, federal and local governments have once and again told them that the new vaccine is safe to be administered.

According to media reports, the H1N1 vaccine is made in the same way as the regular winter flu vaccine that is used with very few, minor side effects by nearly 100 million Americans each year.

PREPARE FOR THE WORST

Statistics show that from Aug. 30 until Sept. 26, the CDC tallied 16,174 hospitalizations of the H1N1 flu cases nationwide and 1,379 deaths associated with the H1N1 virus infection.

Dozens of children and at least 28 pregnant women in the United States have died from the virus and at least 100 pregnant women were sick enough to be hospitalized in intensive care, the CDC said.

The A/H1N1 virus infection was first identified in the United States in late April. By August, 555 people had died of the new virus with 8,842 hospitalizations. More than 40,000 confirmed and probable cases had been reported and more than 1 million infections were estimated to have occurred in the country.

On Friday, the CDC said that latest data showed 27 states had geographically widespread influenza activity while 18 states had regional influenza activity in the past week, and 443 people had died of influenza and pneumonia-associated complications in the same week, bringing the death toll to 1,379 since the beginning of September.

All these key figures indicate that influenza activity -- 99 percent of all subtyped influenza A viruses being reported to the CDC last week were the new A/H1N1 virus -- has remained elevated in the United States and the second wave of the pandemic of A/H1N1flu is imminent.

"This is uncharted territory for an influenza season, we've already had many millions of cases, and we will have many millions of cases more," Frieden told members of Congress on Sept. 29. "Over the next several weeks, there will be some vaccine in the system, but there will also be some roughness as it gets distributed."

Each year, influenza kills about 36,000 people around the country. The majority of deaths are in people older than age 80, according to the CDC. In contrast, the A/H1N1 flu attacks children hardest, while older people have some immunity, probably from exposure early in life to a virus that was genetically similar to the new A/H1N1, according to the National Institutes of Health, which conducted the vaccine tests.

However, most American adults have to wait for massive A/H1N1 flu immunizations in the middle of the month when more vaccination programs are set to start up across the country over the next couple of weeks.

Tough world scenario

The number of A/H1N1 flu cases worldwide has jumped by at least24,000 in two weeks to exceed 343,000, while deaths from the A/H1N1 virus edged up to more than 4,100, according to a Monday report from U.S. health agencies.

The World Health Organization (WHO) regions have reported over 343,298 laboratory-confirmed cases of 2009 H1N1 with at least 4,108 deaths, which is an increase of at least 24,373 cases and 191 deaths since Sept. 20, the CDC said.

The sharp increase in the number of cases was only "the tip of the A/H1N1 pandemic iceberg," as many countries focus surveillance and laboratory testing only on people with severe illness, the CDC added.

(Xinhua News Agency October 6, 2009)