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Much – some will say far too much – has been written and said about H1N1 influenza and how well public-health officials have responded to the threat.

But there is one element of the response to this public-health challenge that has been largely, if not totally, ignored: the profoundly disturbing undercurrent of ageism.

As proud veterans – so many of them now frail and elderly – stood Wednesday in Remembrance Day ceremonies, one could not but be awed by their sacrifice and their stoicism.

At the same time, one could not help but be sickened by this thought: These aging warriors and their contemporaries are virtually the last in line for the H1N1 vaccine.

Does this not fly in the face of all the grandiose talk of respect? Sure, we honour our soldiers by sporting poppies, but should we not also honour them otherwise, with first-rate health care?

In addition to laying wreaths in remembrance of the dead, should we not be fanning out to veterans' hospitals, long-term care facilities, nursing homes and Canadian Legion halls with H1N1 vaccines for the living?

“Lest we forget.” Those words were uttered countless times Wednesday.

We vaccinated current soldiers en masse, along with their Taliban prisoners; per capita, the Department of National Defence has received far more vaccine than any province or territory.

Why have we forgotten the veterans?

Lest we not forget that, in the past century – a century marked by two world wars and countless other bloody conflicts – influenza has killed far more people than all wars combined.

Those hit first were all too often soldiers; infectious diseases thrive in chaotic, unsanitary conditions. In peacetime, it is children who get the flu first and spread it efficiently, but it is predominantly seniors who get sick and die in large numbers.

Soldiers who returned home after the First World War not only survived the trenches, but the greatest plague in history. The Spanish flu, in a mere 24 weeks, claimed somewhere between 20 million and 50 million lives.

Those who came home alive from the Second World War endured a pseudo-pandemic in 1947 that is similar to the one today – a big potential threat that caused very little death. (There were also influenza pandemics in 1957 and 1968, and a pseudo-pandemic in 1976.)

Public-health officials tell us that relegating older people to the bottom of the priority is not ageism but good science.

But all evidence requires an element of interpretation and all public policies involve tough choices.

There are data that suggest that older people – those born prior to 1957 – have some immunity to H1N1 because most of the flu strains that circulated between 1918 and 1957 were of the H1N1 variety, cousins to the current pandemic strain.

Practically, this means that older people have a lesser risk of contracting H1N1.

But the cold, hard data on hospitalizations and deaths also tell us that, when seniors contract H1N1, they have the highest rate of hospitalization and death.

Yet, we hear incessantly that this pandemic strain of influenza is a public-health priority because of the risk it poses to children and young adults. In these groups, flu deaths are normally very rare and now they are merely rare.

The unspoken but implied calculus here is that the death of a senior is less of a tragedy than the death of a child or an adult in the “prime” of his or her life.

We see this attitude in our influenza policies writ large. Governments and public-health authorities have pulled out all the stops in response to H1N1. This may or may not be appropriate.

What is unquestionable is that we pay far too little attention to seasonal flu, the run-of-the-mill disease that comes round each winter, strikes down 4,000 to 8,000 people and results in the hospitalization of tens of thousands more.

Let's be frank: We treat this recurring public-health disaster with casual indifference because deaths and severe illness occur almost exclusively in older people.

When nursing homes are being decimated by influenza, when thousands of grandmas and grandpas are hospitalized with “regular” life-threatening flu, we don't see almost daily press conferences by the Minister of Health, full-page newspaper ads urging vaccination, unprecedented mobilization of public health and hysteria.

We see a collective shrug of the shoulders.

It is a stark reminder that our elders are all too often relegated to the back of the health-care bus. And nowhere is that more true than among aging veterans.

But you didn't see hobbled veterans and their contemporaries rolling up in their wheelchairs and wielding their canes to butt into the vaccine queues. Rather, we saw the young wealthy and healthy – millionaire hockey players and hospital donors – exercise a self-important sense of entitlement.

Haven't we already asked our veterans to sacrifice their health for others quite enough?

There are 10.5 million doses of H1N1 out there across Canada. Let's get some of them into seniors and to veterans in particular. And just as important, let's ramp up the seasonal flu vaccination campaigns to protect seniors from a big threat lurking around the corner.

Lest we forget who the flu really kills.