WASHINGTON — More than 3,000 people a day have a heart attack. If you have one the day after a swine flu shot, will you worry that the vaccine was to blame and not the more likely culprit, all those burgers and fries? The government is starting an unprecedented system to track possible side effects as mass flu vaccinations begin next month.
The idea is to detect any rare but real problems quickly and explain the inevitable coincidences that are sure to cause some false alarms.
“Every day, bad things happen to people. When you vaccinate a lot of people in a short period of time, some of those things are going to happen to some people by chance alone,” said Dr. Daniel Salmon, a vaccine safety specialist at the Department of Health and Human Services.
