All residents will be eligible to be vaccinated for H1N1 flu beginning next week in the U.S. state of Illinois as health departments remove restrictions that had limited access to the
vaccine to those deemed at highest risk, officials said on Thursday.
The change in policy comes as both the city of Chicago and Illinois state health departments, which have overseen the vaccine distribution, say
they have seen demand for the new vaccine ease up in the special clinics held for those at-risk population groups.
To speed the wider distribution, both public health departments said they will soon release some of the vaccine allocations to retail pharmacies.
Melaney Arnold, spokeswoman for the Illinois Department of Public Health, said: "We continue to receive increased allocations of the vaccine
from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and we have a lot of the priority population vaccinated. We just wanted to make sure that we didn't have vaccine sitting on refrigerator shelves, not being used by
anyone, so it is time to open it to the general public."
According to public health departments, the Illinois state will lift its restrictions on who can receive the H1N1 vaccine beginning next Tuesday and the city of Chicago is lifting its restrictions immediately, including allowing anybody to receive it on a first-come-first-served basis at its public clinics at seven city college campuses this Saturday and on Dec. 19.
Since vaccine began arriving in October, 2.7 million doses have been allocated to the state health department, which is responsible for
delivering the vaccine to all areas of the state outside Chicago, with a population of about 10 million. The Chicago health department, serving about 3 million residents, thus far has received 790,000 doses.
H1N1, which first showed up in Mexico and the United States last April, was declared a worldwide pandemic by the World Health Organization in May and has sickened millions on every continent since.