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Flu Vaccine Shortage Of 2004 Instilled Mortal Fear For Some

By SUSAN HEMMINGWAY JOHNSON shjohnson@tampatrib.com

Published: Sep 27, 2005

CLEARWATER - Genevieve Sableski, 71, needs a wheelchair to get around Westfield Shoppingtown Countryside mall, which is just across the street from her home and one of her favorite places to shop. Back pain keeps her from walking long distances. Diabetes and high blood pressure also take a toll on her body.

Despite her ailments, she keeps an exuberant spirit. Not much gets her down.

"My daughter asks me how I am, and I always say, 'I'm fine.' That's my motto: 'I'm fine,' " Sableski said with a joyful laugh.

Nearly a year ago, Sableski stepped out of character emotionally. While standing in a flu-shot line at Tropicana Field, she was close to tears and hysteria amid hundreds of elderly men and women also desperate for the vaccine.

It was almost Thanksgiving. A flu-shot shortage announced in October had caused thousands of elderly people across the country to panic.

They turned out in mobs. The sick and the frail besieged clinics whenever flu shots were announced. Some needed oxygen tanks or leaned on walkers as they stood in line for hours only to be turned away when the vaccines ran out. In California, a 79-year-old woman died after waiting in line for five hours. She fainted and struck her head.

Sableski says she has never known anyone who died from the flu. Last year, though, she thought her life depended on getting the vaccine.

As she watched the news about the shortage last year, Sableski said, "I said maybe this is the year there really will be an epidemic. … I built up in my mind that if I didn't get that flu shot, I was going to die."

Warnings Instill Fear

Each year, public health officials use such words as "urgent," "deadly" and "pandemic" as they try to convince the complacent of the need to get a flu shot.

Consequently, the push to raise vaccination rates has morphed for many elderly into a season of fear.

The specter of an attack by influenza -- and being helpless against it -- elicits anxiety about illness, death and separation from loved ones.

Among those age 65 and older, rates of flu vaccinations have doubled since the late 1980s. In 1999, 66 percent of older people got flu shots, compared with 33 percent in 1989, according to a report by an advisory committee to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Public health officials say that rate is likely to increase to 90 percent by 2010.

Flu strikes up to 20 percent of the entire population each year, according to the CDC. No numbers are available on what share of that 20 percent is elderly.

Stoking anxiety is the continual reminder that flu is unpredictable. Virus strains mutate each year. That means vaccines must be reformulated annually to match predictions about which strains will spread around the globe.

Scientists sometimes don't get the formulation exactly right, such as in 2003, when the Fuji flu confounded expectations.

Vaccine manufacturers -- who must make flu shots in a laborious process that involves millions of chicken eggs -- sometimes fail to bring expected shipments to market, as happened in 2004.

In recent years there have been other twists to ramp up the tension. In 2001 there were the added worries about anthrax attacks by terrorists. In 2003 there were reports that healthy children were dying of flu in Colorado.

And always the public is reminded about the possibility of a pandemic such as the one that occurred in 1918. If the flu virus unexpectedly mutated into a lethal strain, health officials warn, it could strike down millions.

Although more than 65 percent of the elderly get flu shots, the rest "haven't gotten the message," said William Schaffner, of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases.

At a recent news briefing in Washington on the coming flu season, Schaffner opened with a statement about flu and pneumonia: "These are two deadly diseases," he said in a dramatic tone.

To drive the point home, he gave these grim statistics: Each year, 200,000 people are hospitalized because of flu, and 36,000 die.

Most of the deaths, 90 percent, are among the elderly.

"Anything Can Happen"

"Damn right it's dangerous. When you can't breathe, it chokes you up," Clyde Collier, 80, of Seminole, said about the flu.

"You know being 80, anything can happen to you healthwise," he said. "And things could happen quickly."

Collier, who has diabetes and a persistent sinus infection, usually gets a flu shot at his doctor's office. Like many other health professionals, though, his doctor didn't have any last year when supplies ran low.

So when the Pinellas County Health Department announced the flu-shot clinic at Tropicana Field last year, he went. The line moved slowly. He sat on the curb when he needed to rest. His lined face showed weariness and resignation.

Fear among the elderly surrounding flu shots brings up concern for loved ones and generates worries about what would happen if they got sick.

"I worried for months until we got ours in January," said Regina Gillis, of Tampa, married to Rod for 56 years. The two met when she was 18 at her father's general store in the town where they grew up in Nova Scotia.Now she is 74 and her husband is almost 90. He has survived prostate cancer, open heart surgery and a stroke.

Because he can't stand for long periods, Gillis couldn't take him last year to the flu-shot clinics that were attracting hundreds of people. Their doctor quit giving flu shots several years ago.

They stayed home to avoid crowds and germs. She feared that her husband "would get the flu and that would be the end of him," Gillis said.

Staying home was a strategy used by Sableski and her husband, Richard, in the weeks before the day they got up at 3 a.m. to be first in line at Tropicana Field.

The couple went to a Publix on McMullen-Booth Road and stood in line for two hours, but vaccines ran out.

Her husband was able to calm her fears by reminding her that they probably had built up immunity from previous years of flu shots. He told her, "Babe, you're OK. No bug is going to live in you."

They stopped going to restaurants, though, their usual routine on Sunday. The mall was out, too. Sableski would get anxious when she heard someone cough in church.

Relief didn't come until a nurse pricked her upper arm with a flu shot needle at Tropicana Field.

"After I got it, I didn't have a worry in the world. Isn't that awful? But I was so relieved," she said.

That night they went out to dinner at Cody's Roadhouse on U.S. 19, the first time they had gone to a restaurant in months.

Her angst of last year has abated for now. Sableski says she isn't worried because she has heard the news that the vaccine supply this year should be adequate.

Sableski already has an appointment to get a flu shot. This year she is getting it at her doctor's office in early October.

"This year I'm not concerned. Really, I'm not."