I had a co-worker inform me today that they are opting-out of our building's vaccination program, after watching a video on YouTube. The video, which I was aware of (but won't link here), shows an interview with a woman who says she was neurologically damaged by a flu vaccine. She suffers spasms and is only able to walk backwards.

Thus, my co-worker told me that even if there is only a one in a million chance that something may go wrong with their vaccination, it's a risk that they're unwilling to take.

Current statistics show that if you contract swine flu, there is a 1 in 6 chance that you will develop serious complications which require you to be hospitalized. Further, there is roughly a 1 in 100 chance that if you contract H1N1, you will die as a result.

It baffles my mind how someone could avoid a vaccination for a disease which, contracted, has a 1 in 100 chance of killing you because the vaccination carries a one in a million chance of non-fatal complications.

This disease is not discriminating. This week a healthy, physically active Toronto teenager was killed by H1N1. It took 48 hours from the onset of symptoms to death. He was a minor-league hockey player in peak health.

Even if you insist on not vaccinating yourself, and do not develop complications, you are still more than capable of delivering the disease to a person, or persons, who do not share your relative resistance. Will you still be willing to gamble the numbers when other people's lives are on the table?

If that is still not enough incentive, consider also that every human this virus successfully resides in results in many generations of evolution for the virus. With each successive case, a virus could mutate into something even more deadly. This is not supposition, this is scientific fact.

I don't know what more I can do or say. Sometimes it seems like ignorance is more powerful than knowledge.