Flu vaccination campaign a 'mess' that should be discontinued: Canadian health official

Excerpts from an article in the National Post, detailing remarks by Dr. Richard Schabas, Ontario's former chief medical officer and a top health officer in the province:

"In eastern Ontario where I live and work the outbreak is effectively over. If we're immunizing people now essentially you're barring the barn door after the horse is well out the farm gate."

Dr. Schabas said outbreaks of the swine flu in populous parts of the country, including southwestern Ontario and British Columbia, are on the wane.

"I seriously question the continued focus on mass immunization, at least in those areas," he said....

"If the ground is shifting under our feet, if the disease is happening sooner than we expected and we can't immunize 25 or 30 million Canadians in an efficient manner before the outbreak, let's ask the question very seriously: is it worth continuing with this? Because I think increasingly the answer is no," said Dr. Schabas.

The hype and hysteria around the H1N1 pandemic, the millions of dollars spent so far on responding to it, and the dire warnings about it are all unwarranted, according to Dr. Schabas -- who even questions the pandemic label.

He spreads the blame among public health officials, governments and the media. The World Health Organization is jokingly referred to as the World Hysteria Organization, he said, and it set a tone in the spring with its messaging that was adopted around the globe.

"They've just been (champing) at the bit waiting for a pandemic for the last 10 years and I think they dramatically overreacted," said Dr. Schabas.