Each country, really every country in the world, is trying to address this as best they can with the tools at hand. The Americans chose to go with an unadjuvanted vaccine. We, along with most of the Europeans, chose an adjuvanted vaccine. In our view, it has greater prospects for better immunity, as well as making additional vaccine available internationally as a result of that.
To get back to your thing, immunization has transformed the face of childhood. When I was a kid, hospitals were full of kids with the complications of measles, whooping cough, and polio, etc. We've essentially wiped that out.
In the context of this disease that we're facing now, basically there are only two ways to stop the pandemic: either we're not immunized, and so all of us who are susceptible get it--so potentially 10 million of us--or we're immunized. There have been concerns, because back in 1976 there was not actually a pandemic but a large number of Americans were immunized. So you were facing a non-disease and there were about 12 per million people immunized who developed Guillain-Barré. That is set against a background of 10 to 20 per million every single year who get Guillain-Barré from some other cause, mostly campylobacter and other infections, and we have not seen that since. It's not clear whether it was even related to the vaccine of the day, given that it's pretty much the background rate.
If we don't immunize, we will see between 400 and 700 cases of Guillain-Barré from disease, from influenza, because the rates are 40 to 70 per million, not the one per million of severe risk, plus 100,000 in hospital, thousands dead, etc. So the risk ratio in terms of vaccine is very simple: the risk of not being immunized is huge.