Chicken little gets the flu.(flue vaccines)

The story hit late in January, and it barely made a ripple. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were releasing 4.4 million surplus, leftover doses of flu vaccine, while removing almost all restrictions on their distribution. The reason, as the Los Angeles Times reported, was "to ensure that remaining vaccine stocks were not wasted."

Wasted? Wait a minute, what happened to the widespread reports only three months earlier of a massive shortage of flu vaccines--you know, the one that drove seniors to line up outside of health clinics like it was bread day in the old USSR? The one that inspired thousands of journalists across the country to break out the word "pandemic"? The one CNN's Wolf Blitzer described as "a worst-case scenario at the worst possible time"?

Back in October, the U.S. government announced that, due to contamination at the plant of a British supplier, only about 55 million of the 100 million flu-vaccine doses the nation had ordered would be available. Almost uniformly, the media predicted calamity. "What will be the impact of the U.S. losing half its supply of flu vaccine?" asked the Chicago Tribune. The answer: "ER doctors predict a crush of flu cases that will overwhelm an already fragile system, forcing sick and elderly patients to lie on gurneys for hours, squeezing out others who need emergency care."

But somehow, the deadly and much-trumpeted Great Influenza Epidemic of 2004-05 never quite came to be. And the entire episode serves as an object lesson that the combined forces of media hype and media bias can be even more dangerous to your health than the occasional viral contagion.

Some 90 million Americans fall into the "high risk" categories for which doctors recommend a flu vaccination, but in a typical year, only about half of them bother to get a shot. So if normal rates held, the country's 55 million doses would have been plenty to cover all those who needed them. With the government calling on younger and healthier Americans to forego their shots, the supply eventually proved to be more than adequate--so much so that by January the fear became that much of it would go to waste.

But hold on. If vaccine stocks held out because so many people skipped their shots, then millions of Americans must ...