Pitt Study: Majority of Americans wouldn’t use H1N1 vaccine

The majority of Americans wouldn’t use an emergency H1N1 virus vaccine, according to new… The majority of Americans wouldn’t use an emergency H1N1 virus vaccine, according to new research from Pitt and the University of Georgia.

Sandra Quinn, associate dean of student affairs and a professor in the Graduate School of Public Health, worked with three Pitt research associates and a University of Georgia professor to survey 1,543 people.The group found that 63 percent of people would not take a “new, but not yet approved” vaccine for H1N1.

Congress passed an act in 2004, the Project Bioshield Act, that allows the Food and Drug Administration to distribute medicines that haven’t been through the normal testing cycle in emergencies.

“With H1N1, we have the potential for the first large-scale use of [Emergency Use Authorizations] with the American public,” Quinn wrote in her study, published in Biosecurity and Bioterrorism: Biodefense Strategy, Practice and Science last week.

She said the H1N1 vaccines, scheduled for distribution later this fall, won’t be emergency use vaccines but ones that have undergone more rigorous testing.

Quinn, who studies bioterrorism and risk communication, said she wasn’t sure why people wouldn’t want to take an emergency vaccine. Forty-six percent of the people the team surveyed said they were concerned about getting H1N1.

Quinn said she thinks part of people’s reluctancy to take the vaccine has to do with their upbringings.

“Most of us … all had childhood vaccines, so we’ve not by and large seen the impact of communicable diseases, and so we’ve gotten a little complacent,” she said.

She added that it was also possible that people might have a hard time distinguishing credible medical sites from people’s blogs and thus read information on the Internet that would cause them to panic about taking an emergency-use vaccine.

Quinn said her team hopes to conduct an additional round of questioning later this month or in November, if it gets the funding in time, to ask people why they wouldn’t take an emergency vaccine.

She said the results of her study weren’t very surprising.

“It’s sort of in keeping with what we know, which is there is not as high use of a flu vaccine in general as I would hope,” Quinn said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Research Center of Excellence in Minority Health and Health Disparities at the National Institutes of Health sponsored the research.