Slate has an interesting and very well-written article by David Dobbs on why it makes more sense to vaccinate children against the threat of flu*, rather than go the traditional route--vaccinating the sick and the old. The evidence is thick:
Because the human immune system weakens with age, only 28 percent of elderly people who get vaccinated develop immunity. The low rate of protection means that 84 percent of all elderly (the 72 percent whose vaccinations don't take, along with those who don't get vaccinated) remain prey to a flu virus that runs otherwise largely unchecked. . . The researchers confirmed that the flu spreads primarily via toddlers and school children, whose immature immune systems are easily infected and who have lousy hygiene. . . A whopping 90 percent are successfully immunized by a flu shot, compared to the 28 percent figure for the elderly and 60 percent for middle-aged adults. . following a devastating 1957 epidemic, Japan in 1963 established mandatory childhood flu immunization. By 1970 the country was vaccinating 50 percent to 85 percent of schoolchildren annually. Between that year and 1987, flu-related deaths fell 40 percent, saving 40,000 lives a year.I'm going to very amateurishly toss off another idea that a public health or virology expert can confirm or contradict: since this dread bird flu is, in fact, like the 1918 Spanish influenza, as researchers have shown, in some ways, might it not be like the Spanish influenza in other ways? In particular, the odd attack on the young. The strange thing about the Spanish influenza, in fact, the socially devastating thing, was that it killed young healthy people. So it seems like it makes even more sense to vaccinate children, protecting both them and their parents.
*Update: Dobbs helpfully pointed out that his article is only talking about vaccinating against the regular flu, not the bird flu as I originally stated, since no vaccine yet exists against the bird flu. So I suppose that makes my theory even less likely to work, considered with brimful's counsel in comments that the youth targeted by the Spanish influenza were probably 18-35-year-olds, not necessarily children. Still, age demographics and efficacy are always something to think about.
