A must read particularly pertaining to immunity if born prior to certain years.
Got to say, after reading this, not only our government in the U.S. failed, the World Health Organization failed. That agency knew of the UK's failure to track the virus in any meaningful way, and Indonesia's situation of withholding such for testing, and did not declare a world pandemic until far too late for companies to manufacture a vaccine.
Read and ask why is the United States sending this organization any amount of resources to do nothing.
New Scientist
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1957
An H2N2 virus causes the "Asian" flu pandemic, completely displacing the H1N1 viruses that have been circulating in humans since 1918. The pandemic is fairly mild, killing 1 to 1.5 million people worldwide.
The virus is produced by a reassortment, in which human-adapted H1N1 swaps genes with an H2N2 bird flu. The new H and N surface proteins mean most people do not have antibodies to the virus, allowing it to go pandemic. However, its human-adapted genes mean it is not as lethal to humans as the 1918 virus, which came, with few changes, from birds.
People tend to mount the best immune response to the first kind of flu virus they experience. Because of this, people born before 1957, whose first experience of flu would have been the H1N1 viruses then in circulation, have some immunity to the 2009 H1N1 strain causing the current pandemic. People born after the 1957 pandemic do not have this immunity.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18063-timeline-the-secret-history-of-swine-flu.html?full=true
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...May 2009
Although swine flu seems to be spreading slowly, it is still progressing quickly enough to justify preparing for a pandemic. However, the WHO delays declaring a pandemic, partly because there is not enough evidence that the virus is spreading in the general population outside the Americas, where it originated.
New Scientist reveals that Europe is not testing people with flu symptoms unless they have recently travelled to an affected area in the Americas, or have had close contact with someone who did. As a result, Europe cannot detect spread in the general population. These restrictions may be making the pandemic "invisible" to the monitoring authorities.
As concerns mount, it transpires that many countries are poorly prepared for this scenario and that supplies of H1N1 vaccine cannot be prepared in time to catch the second wave.
June 2009
The UK and other countries change their rules and start testing people who have flu but no North American contacts. Cases of swine flu are soon detected.
On 11 June the WHO officially declares swine flu to be a pandemic. This is the signal for the vaccine industry to start making pandemic vaccine (paid for by governments), rather than conventional flu vaccine (paid for by ordinary health services).
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18063-timeline-the-secret-history-of-swine-flu.html?full=true
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