[Ashartus]

While the government did purchase too much vaccine, that was mainly because at first they thought 2 doses would be necessary. If it had turned out to be a bad one there would have been a lot of criticism if they ran out. They still wouldn't have used it all - too many people believe the stuff the anti-vaccine groups say - but I don't think they could take that chance. And while the outbreak wasn't as bad as feared, it was still pretty bad, with pretty high infection rates at its peak (and it killed more than twice as many children as a typical flu season).

Still, some positives came out of it:
- It raised a lot of awareness of flu prevention, hand washing, etc.
- The vaccine roll-out was very thoroughly monitored, generating a good set of safety data.
- Enough people got vaccinated to most likely prevent a third wave, but pandemic H1N1 still seems to be out-competing the other strains, so we have very little influenza circulating right now during what would normally be flu season.
- Hopefully there will be some good field data on flu vaccine effectiveness for next year - there are good data on immune responses from the vaccine, but it would be nice to have solid data on how that translates to people actually getting sick or not.
- We learned how much our government coordination of the response needs to improve.