The Owen Sound Police Services will complain to the province and to the local health unit about pandemic planning regarding the H1N1 flu.
Chief Tom Kaye told the police services board on Wednesday that police officers were supposed to have been among the first wave of people immunized against the flu, in the wake of the SARS outbreak in Toronto several years ago.
But somehow the police slipped out of the first wave, behind health care workers and others deemed to be in high-risk categories.
Its ridiculous, Kaye says, given that police officers are often the first to arrive at the scene of a tiered response, before firefighters and before paramedics.
They deserve proper health protection.
Because so many police officers did not get immunized in the first wave, the flu hit the OSPS particularly hard, Kaye says.
The organization lost 541 person-hours to illness, he told the board.
The chief isnt just distressed about that.
When police were finally able to be vaccinated, he says, they were told to go to public clinics and cut to the front of the lines, ahead of people who were waiting hours for their own shots.
Kaye refused to allow his officers to do that. He wonders why all emergency service workers couldnt have been accommodated at, perhaps, the city fire hall.