After what some citizens had seen as a troubling delay, the Fairfield County School Board voted Thursday night to allow the Department of Health and Environmental Control to administer H1N1 vaccines in the schools.

Apart from one school board member who arrived late and one abstention, the vote was unanimous.

A conflicting work schedule prevented District 6 member Marchella Pauling from participating in the vote. Annie McDaniel (Dist. 4) abstained.

“I’m not opposed to the shots being given to our students,” McDaniel said. “I support it one-hundred percent. I just couldn’t change my position just because we were getting pressure from the media.”

Her reservations, she said, rested solely on what she described as DHEC’s reluctance to assume liability should there be any problems.

“You can support something, yet still be a little gun shy,” she said.

DHEC’s Health Supervisor for Fairfield County could not be reached at press time, but George Timms, Program Coordinator for DHEC’s Region 3, which includes Fairfield County, said that he was not aware of any problems incurred thus far with their vaccination program.

The question now is How soon and how much?

“It’s going to take some time to make this happen,” Timms said, noting that consent forms have to be sent from DHEC to the schools, then from the schools out to the parents, who then must return them to the schools.

But, he said, it should be a matter of a week, perhaps a little longer.

Then the issue become how much serum is available.

“The actual number is a moving target,” Timms said. “It keeps changing.”

The serum that arrives at DHEC gets divided out among participating schools, he said, depending on how many consent forms are returned.

A survey sent out by the board to more than 3,000 parents a few weeks ago netted a return of less than 50 percent. Of those returned, only 586 indicated a desire to have their children vaccinated in the school system.