Decision made over weekend to postpone some school vaccination clinics, including today's at West Riverview School

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By Brent Mazerolle
Times & Transcript Staff

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If you were counting on your school-aged children getting vaccinated against H1N1 flu at West Riverview School today, forget it. The same advice applies for tomorrow, if your children attend Louis-J.-Robichaud School in Shediac and École Abbey Landry in Memramcook. A total of seven vaccination clinics in southeastern New Brunswick, including these three in public schools, were postponed by provincial health officials over the weekend.

And if you are hoping to get your pre-school aged children vaccinated, you have at least a few days to wait. As of about 8 p.m. yesterday, the only clinics in southeastern New Brunswick planned for today and tomorrow were being held in schools for schoolchildren only. There is only one exception. A clinic at Fort Folly is open to "priority groups" tomorrow morning, but whether or not anyone from outside Fort Folly would be vaccinated is not made clear in provincial communications.

After that, the only two clinics in the Moncton area billed as being for members of priority groups other than school-aged children are one in Salisbury Wednesday evening and another at Moncton's Champlain School on Thursday evening.

The school clinics, both those postponed and those going ahead, were planned before the federal government announced on Friday this week's supplies of vaccine would be cut back.

It's important to note instances of H1N1 flu in New Brunswick have been mild -- among the hundreds or thousands infected (the number is unclear because only cases requiring hospitalization are being tracked) only five people had been hospitalized as of Friday and there have been no deaths.

While she was breaking the news Friday that a sudden decline in the national supply of H1N1 vaccine would mean less for New Brunswickers this week, the province's chief medical officer emphasized a "children first" message as she asked adults to wait their turns for the vaccine.

"Pre-school aged children -- those were the children that seemed to have the highest rates of hospitalization in the first wave," Dr. Eilish Cleary told reporters. As for their older siblings under 18, who are a second key priority group, she said, "school-aged children -- those are the people we are seeing the highest rates of activity among now."

A part of the problem in getting children vaccinated first was that no one was turned away from clinics earlier in the week, even if they didn't represent priority groups.

That policy has now been changed, but combined with the national supply delay, it has been enough to cause cancellations and postponements of numerous clinics. Dr. Cleary said Friday 46,000 doses of the vaccine were initially expected to arrive early to mid-week, but, "the projections have been changing continually," she admitted. As of Friday, provincial health officials couldn't say with certainty when the general population might get vaccinated.

Meanwhile, there's no word on when postponed clinics might be rescheduled.