It's hard to know quite what to make of Henry Niman. He does have the credentials, but has chosen to operate mostly outside of established scientific circles. The larger virology/epidemiology community is reluctant to accept some of his ideas, largely because he holds critical details of his theories close to his chest. Hasn't published anything in years (unless you count his prolific efforts to reach a lay internet audience). His recent work is really more bioinformatics than virology. He seems to take sort of a shotgun approach; makes a lot of predictions, some of which are more than a bit alarmist in nature, but so far he hasn't hit enough targets to impress much of anyone beyond his flublogia loyalists ("Nimanites" I believe they're called). On the other hand, nobody seems very eager to simply brush his ideas aside altogether, either.
I almost hope I get it now, so I have some possible immunity to a mutated strain this fall, if it does become worse.
I've been leaning slightly toward that idea myself. Sort of a twist on the live vaccine concept. But it's a risky strategy. I certainly wouldn't want to try it without a supply of Tamiflu already on hand. I think what you'd be betting on is that this will turn out to be a repeat of 1918, with what we're seeing now being the "herald" wave, to be followed by a killer wave in the fall. I DO think this thing could still fizzle as days in the Northern Hemisphere get warmer (and, perhaps more importantly,
longer). The case numbers are growing, but so are the number of people who have recovered, and because the tallies are not lowered to reflect that, things may not be quite as grim as they appear to be. It seems to me that what counts the most is the total number of people infected -- and contagious -- at any given time.
What troubles me is that every approach to this thing is risky. The vaccine could fail (several ways), and if it does perk up in the fall, there could be a lot of opportunities for it to aquire resistance to the antivirals, since the recent seasonal strains (the H1N1 and the H3N2) have all exhibited resistance to either the neuraminidase inhibitors or the M2 inhibitors -- and it could also aquire greater virulence, or shift its antigens (meaning that whether the price you paid was a poke in the arm or the risk of serious illness, you'd get less protection in return).
In other words, we could be in the same boat we're in now, except
worse, because we'd be facing it essentially empty-handed. PLUS, public perception of the degree of risk would be dulled, and the credibility of the epidemiological community would suffer. Everyone would be laughing about all the fuss that was made over the pandemic that never happened. Boy that cried wolf and all that.
