I’m not getting a flu shot this year.

In truth, I’ve never got a flu shot — and I’ve never contracted the flu.

Let the wood-knocking commence.

But this year, the odds are stacked against me. If recent reports are accurate, there’s about a 50 percent chance that I (or anyone else) will get swine flu by the end of the year.

And there’s a 99.9 percent chance it won’t kill me. It is, for the most part, a benign threat.

Yet people are clamoring for vaccines this flu season like never before, horrified by media catchphrases such as “global pandemic,” and are afraid the disease is something more along the lines of the bubonic plague than an average winter flu.

Let’s face it: There’s a very good chance you might get swine flu this winter if you don’t get a vaccine.

But I’m not going to, despite my mother’s incessant urgings, and it’s not just because I’m boastfully confident I’ll be able to avoid it.

I am fearful, yes. The illness is already becoming so pervasive that one of the leading soothsayers of H1N1’s potential to become a worldwide crisis, Pulitizer prize-winning science journalist Laurie Garrett, came down with the bug last week.

Irony aside, Garrett offered some frightening commentary on our failures to address swine flu appropriately and efficiently.

“We have utterly failed the globalization test in our response to H1N1,” Garrett wrote in an edition of Newsweek.

Garrett points out that about 1 billion doses of the H1N1 vaccine have been ordered worldwide, but on a planet that is home to over 6.5 billion people, 85 percent of the world is being excluded.

“Worse, those 1 billion orders have been prioritized, with the wealthiest nations at the top of the list,” Garrett said. “Before New Year’s Eve only about 5 percent of the world population will have been immunized.”

That’s a startling statistic. Only one in 20 will have access to the swine flu vaccine, and those who need it the most — the global masses of poor who lack adequate health care services — are not being invited to share in what would be the only life-saving medicine if H1N1 were a deadly infection.

In 1918, the Spanish flu inflected a third of the world population and killed anywhere from 50 million to 100 million people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

2009 is not 1918. The swine flu is not the Spanish flu. But if it was, given how densely populated the world is now, we’d be suffering through a medical holocaust of unparalleled destruction, and we wouldn’t possess the means to fight or control it.

The pharmaceutical industry needs a wake-up call. A 5 percent vaccine availability is not good enough.

This is why I’m not getting a vaccine. Others need it more — and the human race needs to be better prepared the next time we have a pandemic outbreak.

Swine flu is just a warning shot.

Let’s hope we’re better prepared when the next 1918 comes around.

Dustin is knocking on wood. Reach him at dustin.volz@asu.edu.