The nature of vaccines means you need to quite a long lead time for development, manufacture and trial.
For the Govt to be able to stockpile a sufficiency of the specific H1N1 vaccine to cover the population, they had commission the development of the vaccine very early on in the presentation of swine flu.
At the time of that decision, all available evidence suggested that H1N1 could be an extremely nasty epidemic, with a high mortality rate, especially amongst children It is wrong to blame the Govt for ensuring we were well prepared with a working vaccine.
Despite it being, thankfully, a mild presentation, it is still the case that hundreds of thousands suffered symptoms, and over 450 people died. It could have been a lot lot worse, and where there are severe threats to the public health and wellbeing, the precautionary principle should be invoked.
I do think that the Government erred in one area of its response though. The setting up of Tamiflu hotlines, and the dispensing of tamiflu on the basis of a multiple choice questionaire was dubious.Tamiflu remains one of the few drugs we have that can help to retard the spread of a pandemic virus, and issuing it so freely gives to much opportunity for the next mutation of the flu virus to build up an immunity to the action of Tamiflu.
Other than that, I look forward to reading the report and its recommendations. I for one think that, by and large, the Government and the Health Services should be praised for their preparedness and response, rather than castigated by hindsight.