As a schoolteacher, Amy Yale is surrounded by the primary transmitters of swine flu, but she still doesn’t want anything to do with the highly sought H1N1 vaccine. Her friend, Theresa Loya, has a son with asthma whose pediatrician implored her to get him vaccinated — but she, too, has refused doctor’s orders.

Even though most health experts vouch for the safety of the H1N1 vaccine that is slowly being distributed this month, and many people have placed their names on waiting lists to get it, there’s a wide range of skeptics who worry the vaccine is untested, fear the potential side effects or are, quite simply, apathetic.

“There’s so many chemicals in all these shots we don’t know about. The doctors just say you need it,” said Loya, a Santa Clara real estate agent and mother of six.

“I don’t think you should take any flu shot that just came out,” chimed in Yale, who was having coffee with Loya in Santa Clara on Thursday morning. “I think we’re a society that overmedicates. People sneeze and get an antibiotic.”

A CNN poll conducted last weekend found that nearly half of those surveyed believe the H1N1 vaccine is safe, however 43 percent of those polled believe the “vaccine has side effects that can lead to death or serious health problems.” In a Field Poll study completed early this month, 72 percent of those surveyed said they would get vaccinated if doctors recommended it, but 27 percent said they would not.

“I think there’s a lot of mistrust in general for vaccines,” said Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, chief of infectious diseases at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford. “Why take a healthy young child and give them something that might cause a side effect? I understand. But it’s very clear that if we didn’t vaccinate even a small proportion of all the children, then within a few years we would see all of these diseases return.”

While vaccines have just about wiped out polio, tetanus, measles and mumps and scores of other debilitating diseases, she said, within the last several years, cases of measles popped up in San Diego and Arizona and mumps in the Midwest when a growing number of parents didn’t vaccinate their children.

Maldonado said she is confident that both the seasonal and H1N1 vaccines are safe. At Packard Children’s Hospital, she is in the midst of studying the side effects of the swine flu vaccine on 130 adults from the age of 18 to 65. (Other hospitals are studying other age groups.) So far, she said, after studying daily reports, “we have not seen any unexpected side effects,” she said. She has seen the usual side effects, including redness or swelling around the injection site, and an occasional mild fever or nausea.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says high-risk groups — pregnant women, health-care workers, children from 6 months to 4 years of age, and all children with chronic health conditions — should be the first to receive the H1N1 vaccine. The risk for infection among people 65 or older appears to be less than with other age groups, studies show, probably because they were exposed to similar strains in the 1940s and ’50s. People allergic to eggs should not get the vaccine.

But still, health officials didn’t engender much confidence last spring when they closed schools and canceled community events when the H1N1 virus first broke out in the U.S. The CDC reports that one in five U.S. children have had flulike symptoms this month, but the virus has turned out to be relatively mild compared with the global killer pandemic that had been feared. And popular conservative talk show host Glenn Beck stirred up concerns when he highlighted how hundreds of Americans who were vaccinated during a now infamous swine flu scare in 1976 developed a serious neurological disorder called Guillain-Barre ﻿Syndrome. “You don’t know if this (the H1N1 vaccine) is going to cause neurological damage like it did in the 1970s,” he told his listeners. The risks, however, were considered small, with an additional 1 case per 100,000 people vaccinated in 1976; the CDC estimates those risks at one case in 1 million this year.

Still, Loya said she and her husband were swayed by a YouTube video titled “Cheerleader Gets a Swine Flu Shot & Now She Can Only Walk Backwards!” (The narrator on the video claimed it was the seasonal flu shot that caused her problems and there was no evidence presented that the vaccine was responsible for the girl’s rare neurological ailment.)

All are stoking fears and uncertainties.

Loya, who won’t vaccinate her children, said she has purchased expensive homeopathic tablets she hopes will ward off the virus. Her friend, Yale, is keeping her hands washed.

But Philip Sousa, a 26-year-old Santa Clara Law School student, isn’t paying much attention to any of it. Despite all the e-mails from campus administrators urging him to get inoculated, and signs around campus to wash his hands, “I figure I’m healthy and if I get swine flu, I’ll just be sick like the regular flu. It doesn’t scare me that much.”

Contact Julia Prodis Sulek at 408-278-3409.