Teens and young adults should be the first vaccinated against bird flu, after health care workers who would deliver the vaccine and specialists involved in making it, two medical ethicists said on Thursday.
Sounds a bit like Children of the corn. Let the youngens live, the rest are doomed. "If we have the pandemic flu, we are not going to have enough vaccine and we are going to have to make tough allocation and rationing decisions," said Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel of the National Institutes of Health.
But one approach balances how many years left a person can reasonably expect with how many years have already been invested. "Within this framework, 20-year-olds are valued more than 1-year-olds because the older individuals have more developed interests, hopes and plans but have not had the opportunity to realize them," they wrote.
Harsh