Eleven members of the Western Hockey League's Chilliwack Bruins got H1N1 vaccinations early Monday morning, but team physician Paul Basson insists it was not another case of hockey players jumping the queue.

The National Hockey League's Calgary Flames and American Hockey League's Abbotsford Heat have come under fire this week for getting their players vaccinated ahead of the general public. Basson isn't familiar with the circumstances surrounding those teams, but he believes his logic was sound and defensible in giving select Bruins the flu shot.

“I was running an H1N1 flu clinic on Sunday morning, and my staff and I mixed up some vaccines to inject into approximately 250 patients. Once these vaccines are mixed, they are only stable for 24 hours, and at the end of that clinic we had 25 doses left over,” Dr. Basson explained. “Those doses would have been no good for anybody by 8:45 a.m. on Monday morning. The only group of people I could reliably get together on such short notice was the Bruins. They had some concerns about the perception of queue jumping, but the situation was such that if I didn't use those vaccines on somebody, they would have gone to waste.”

Basson carefully outlined the situation for Bruins officials, including team president Darryl Porter.

“This is not something we actively pursued, and we absolutely did not want to have the perception of queue jumping,” Porter said. “We were adamant about that, because we recognize the fact that there should be no preferential treatment for our players. But this was something that was presented to us late Sunday night that made sense under the circumstances.”

Before going ahead, Basson made one final phone call to Dr. Brian Brodie, the president of the B.C. Medical Association. They agreed that while the perception of queue jumping might be present, the greater sin would be to see the vaccines thrown out.

A couple Chilliwack players have asthma, and that automatically made the eligible to receive the vaccine. Due to doctor-patient confidentiality, Basson couldn't elaborate on who got the shot, but he did say that recent studies show youths 18-and-under are at particularly high risk to contract the swine flu. The Bruins roster currently includes two 16-year-olds, eight 17-year-olds and three 18-year-olds.

While it's not part of the official criteria for getting flu shots, Basson also believes those players' occupations put them at high risk for contracting the swine flu.

With 36 games played away from home, the Bruins spend long hours packed into buses in very close proximity to one another, and they come into constant contact with players from opposing teams. They do this while playing in arenas full of potential virus-carriers.

“The other thing is that the Bruins go out to numerous schools, old-age homes and the hospital, doing a lot of volunteer work,” Basson added. “If they were to go into one of those places, I think there's a real risk of either them giving the flu to the group they are visiting, or contracting it themselves.”

Dr. Perry Kendall, B.C.'s Chief Health Officer, has said that he will be in contact with the Abbotsford Heat team physician to find out why that team got its vaccines. If Kendall should happen to phone Basson, he feels his reasoning would withstand questioning.

“After the Heat story came out, I anticipated getting a phone call from somebody,” he said. “But I want to reiterate again, if there was a sin, the sin of destroying perfectly good vaccine would be, in my eyes, a greater sin than giving it to what I think is a perfectly deserving group.”