^ What Blaahs said.
This reminds me of the thalidomide incident where pregnant women were prescirbed the drug to treat morning sickness. It turned out that thalidomide caused limb abnormalities in the infants. The problem is that no one would have been able to predict that.
Only when the situation arises, the problem is brought into everyone's attention, despite prior testing that was done to legitimise the use of a particular drug. Lots of pharmacological agents were approved then withdrawn over the years by the body responsible for releasing the drugs to the general public, e.g. the FDA in America.
The current development of biochemistry and genetic study is not yet adequate to allow us to map all cause-effect relationships pertaining to individual drugs and pathogens. This is why the nature of A(H1N1) is still unclear and to identify its origin as well as to predict that this specific reassortant strain would be infectious is still not possible with our current technology.
The bottomline is yes, it's unfortunate that sometimes accidents happen but for the most part:
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Originally Posted by Blaahs
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drugs, vaccines and such all have to go under clinical trials before they can be administered to the public.
[...]
if they are ready to distribute a vaccine to the public, it should be relatively safe.
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That about sums up what it is happening in our society at the moment.