Nurses Express Safety Concerns About H1N1 Vaccine
By Jacob Molyneux, blog editor
Nurse blogger Not Nurse Ratched has written a post on her decision not to get the H1N1 vaccine shot until she is more convinced of its safety.
I’m just urging caution against the knee-jerk fear reaction that is, no doubt, going to make hordes of people swarm out to clamor for this vaccine. I’ll be watching for more data on it and might modify my decision, but for now I’m going to just say no.
Judging from responses to a recent post we ran on the topic (“cancel my subscription” appeared more than once), the loudest clamor may be from those who are driven by fear of the vaccine rather than fear of the H1N1 virus. In the post in question, Doug Olsen, a nurse ethicist, examined the ethical side of the question of whether or not nurses should get vaccinated.
(Whether or not you agree with Olsen’s guarded conclusion in favor of vaccination, his post demonstrated how a professional ethicist uses a set of concepts as tools—not to come up with a definitive answer that can be called “right” or “wrong” but instead to examine the moral dimensions of a decision. We hope that some of the concepts he used will be seen as tools to help nurses make their own informed decisions.)
By way of update, here’s an addendum we received from Olsen that addresses some of the concerns about vaccine safety expressed in the various comments:
Any obligation of nurses to protect the patient by getting flu vaccine depends on trust in the science and in the system […]