It’s hot in the Heat kitchen this week, and it ought to be.

Twenty-two of the local AHL players got the increasingly scarce H1N1 vaccine on Monday and Tuesday.

Attempting damage control was Dave Sheldon, the Heat’s communication director.

The first explanation was the “heavy travel schedule” of the team members, who he compared to “John Q. Public” when they went to a local clinic for their shots.

Nowhere in the regional health authorities guidelines for initial high-risk group vaccinations is any mention of travel.

If it was a concern, there are a great many people who travel around the country as much, if not more, than hockey players.

So where’s the official recommendation that they get inoculated ASAP?

There isn’t one.

And John Q. Public doesn’t have a team doctor on side, sending him to a clinic which has a supply of vaccine, and where the same doctor happens to work.

We’re asked to believe it was justifiable to vaccinate the Heat players because they are out in the community – at churches, schools, malls, etc. It’s a matter of public safety.

One: It has not been established that any of the Heat members actually had H1N1. Some of them only displayed “flu-like symptoms.”

Like half the population of B.C. right about now.

Two: How many times are Heat players out and about in the community? Once, twice a week? Three times?

If this justification had validity, then teachers, bus drivers, even sales clerks, ought to be in the vaccination queue way, way ahead of a bunch of hockey players.

Every one of those jobs, and dozens more, involve hundreds, even thousands of person-to-person contacts daily.

For paramedics, police officers and firefighters, the contact is usually hands-on. But no vaccine yet for them, either.

Club president Tom Mauthe was closer to acceptable optics when he acknowledged there may be negative public perception, but emphasized that the hockey players got the shot after the team doctor examined them and determined they were in a high risk group.

Exactly how the doctor came to that conclusion is unclear.

However, nothing we’ve heard so far from national and provincial health officials would put these players in a first high-risk category.

The players are certainly not pregnant, they definitely aren’t under five years old, they’re not caretakers of high risk patients, and presumably, all 22 didn’t have pre-existing medical conditions.

The team doctor has subsequently told other media that he feels the vaccine distribution guidelines are, or should be, at the discretion of doctors.

The provincial health officer does not agree.

Dr. Perry Kendall said administering the vaccine to the Heat players did not follow provincial policy or protocol.

He said he’s going to have a conversation with the doctor who administered the shots.

And therein lies the other major rub to this story.

In Alberta, a health official was fired this week for giving the vaccine to the Calgary Flames players and their families.

The premier called for an inquiry, and the chief medical officer apologized for what he termed was “a deplorable situation.”

Yet, in B.C., the doctor who inoculated the Heat players gets a “conversation.” And health minister Kevin Falcon as much as shrugs, and says these things will happen.

Yes, they will. And when they do, it would be good for government bureaucracy to send an unmistakable message that any further breaches won’t be tolerated.