Playing Lifeboat

Via GeekPress: National Geographic News rethinks who should be vaccinated against pandemic influenza.

Under the current plan, the ill elderly top the list, while healthy people age 2 to 64 are last in line.
This plan was based on recommendations from the National Vaccine Advisory Committee and the Advisory Committee on Immunization Policy.
It operates under several assumptions, including a prediction of how the virus will kill.
"The greatest risk of hospitalization and death—as during the 1957 and 1968 pandemics and annual influenza—will be in infants, the elderly, and those with underlying health conditions," the authors write.
Now Ezekiel Emanuel and Alan Wertheimer of the National Institutes of Health's Department of Clinical Bioethics in Bethesda, Maryland, have proposed an alternative scheme.