Are you vaccinated? Some worried Utahns avoiding H1N1 vaccine

As the weather gets colder, the cacophony of sniffles and hacking at Mark Pray's home in Payson gets louder. Most weeks in October through December find three, four, maybe even all five of his children in bed, shivering with the symptoms of some flu or another.

"We might get respite for a week or two, but that's generally what we plan on doing during the winter — being sick," Pray said. "I save all my vacation time in anticipation."

In spite of that — or perhaps because of it — the Prays haven't lined up with thousands of other Utahns at mass clinics to get the vaccine for the novel H1N1 influenza.

"I mean, don't get me wrong, I was scared about the swine flu at first," he said. "I worried all my kids were going to die. But now we're getting down to it, it's just like being sick with any other flu. We know how to handle the flu."

Pray's not the only skeptic. Twitter posts questioning the vaccine, including talk show host Bill Maher's recent declaration, "If u get a swine flu shot ur an idiot," chirp in at about 300 tweets a minute. Internet forums on the topic rack up comments nearly as fast.

Some talk comes, as expected, from those same government haters who have been fighting the polio vaccine for years. Most of the discussion, though, is going on in homes where parents generally trust doctors, the government and believe in "immunization by 2."

About 50 percent of adults are opposed to getting the H1N1 vaccine for themselves, according to a recent Associated Press poll. Thirty-eight percent of parents, for various reasons, say they are unlikely to immunize their children.

Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center, a nonprofit based in Virginia, calls it "a resistance" fueled by an increasingly educated public.

"The response from the public to the H1N1 vaccine can't be separated out from a growing education among health-care consumers," she said. "People are becoming more wary of pharmaceuticals. They're eating organic, joining health clubs and taking more responsibility for their health."

Conflicting media and government messages about the severity of the epidemic and the safety of the vaccination spur confusion among would-be educated health-care consumers, she said.