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Some people have questions about whether swine flu vaccine is being distributed fairly.
Because vaccine supplies are limited, federal health officials advise giving priority to people most likely to get seriously ill from H1N1 flu.
The high-risk groups are pregnant women, children 6 months and older, young adults up to 24, anyone with a chronic medical condition, health-care workers and emergency responders.
In New York, Wall Street giants Goldman Sachs and Citigroup recently got doses of vaccine for at-risk employees, drawing criticism that the hard-to-find vaccine is going to the privileged first.
Here in Charlotte, some healthy people got the vaccine before all the high-risk groups have been vaccinated. For example, one of my Observer colleagues, a healthy woman in her 40s, got vaccinated recently when she took her 3-year-old twins to a Mecklenburg County Health Department clinic targeted at pregnant women and young children. After vaccinating the kids, a nurse offered the vaccine to the parents.
Later, another colleague, a healthy 39-year-old, took her two sons, 6 and 3, to the department for vaccinations. But when she asked for one herself, she was turned down.
I also heard a complaint recently after UNC Charlotte opened its clinics to faculty and staff. The clinics were initially targeted at students, who are among the most susceptible to swine flu. UNCC had identified high-risk students and notified them of the clinics. But fewer students than expected showed up.
Dr. Robert Jones, medical director of the student health center, felt a responsibility to offer the vaccine he had ordered to the rest of the university to "make sure our campus community was taken care of."
But after several days of clinics, UNCC had 4,300 doses left. The university sent the doses to the health department, which is offering them to Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools students in clinics that started Monday. "We certainly don't want to hold on to vaccine that other people could use," Jones said.
Health department officials acknowledged that a few people may have gotten vaccinated at its clinics, even though they weren't in high-risk groups.
Deputy Health Director Bobby Cobb said the department hired temporary nurses to help with the clinics and directed them to give the vaccine to high-risk groups. But he said state and federal health officials have also advised local providers not to refuse people who show up and want to be vaccinated.
"Part of the training is customer service," Cobb said. "Let's keep people happy... We were trying to do it fairly and not have fights."
It seems that both the health department and UNCC are trying to do the right thing. In these early days of the vaccine program, they don't know how many doses they'll get and when. They're trying to get the vaccine out as quickly as they can.
It's a delicate balance. Many people don't want the vaccine and complain that it has been produced too quickly. Others want it now and complain the government has been too slow.
I asked Dr. Anne Schuchat of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about this dilemma. She reiterated that limited vaccine should go first to high-risk groups. But she had another message too:
"Focus on vaccinating and not turning people away...," she said. "Vaccine that is not given doesn't do anybody any good."
