Unless it's a matter of life and death, I'm unwilling to stand in long lines for anything.

Concert tickets, video games, Twilight books, Beanie Babies, big-box holiday shopping the morning after Thanksgiving? Count me out.

I grew up in a very small and very remote town in western Colorado. We didn't have a lot of stores. Most of our school clothes were ordered from catalogs. It took forever for first-run motion pictures to be screened in our town. We learned to wait for or do without many things. Best I can tell, it didn't hurt us any.

Even in today's instant-gratification world, waiting for most things I need or want doesn't faze me. Uninterrupted sleep has become more important than being first in line to buy Krispy Krème doughnuts or a new version of Windows for my computer.

Then came H1N1 influenza. All of a sudden, waiting in line for vaccine seems pretty darned important.

My daughter got an important lesson about the economics of supply this past weekend when she and her father attempted to get H1N1 immunizations. The four clinics conducted by the Salt Lake Valley Health Department were scheduled from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday, although by the time my husband and daughter arrived at one location around 8:30 a.m., the vaccine was long gone. The health department's Web site says stay tuned for more information about additional supplies.

Meanwhile, President Barack Obama on Friday declared the H1N1 swine flu outbreak a national emergency. That eliminates red tape for hospitals and doctors' offices to enable them to handle large numbers of sick people.

Unfortunately, no presidential decree can make vaccine grow faster in egg-based cultures, which officials say has resulted in fewer doses being available. Mwwore than 1,000 people nationwide have died from H1N1 influenza. According to Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there have been "millions of cases of pandemic influenza in the United States, and the numbers continue to increase."

However, seed strains of the virus grown in eggs to produce the vaccine have not been as productive as predicted, the New York Times reports. One company was producing only 1.5 doses of the vaccine from each egg, compared with the three to four doses it normally gets for seasonal flu strains. It has since upped its production to three doses per egg. There have also been delays placing the vaccine into vials and syringes.