The Flu
By I just received an email from a reader and friend who has a PhD in bioengineering, focusing on biowarfare defense. She’s thinking about the flu vaccine issue. Frankly, I have to confess I had no idea this was such a big public health issue (perhaps because I never get the shot or the flu, myself). I recently talked to my Grandparents and they’re pretty concerned. Live and learn. Anyway, here’s her analysis, along with a few pointed questions, which sound just about right to me:
I heard on NPR that the Kerry campaign is spinning the flu shot crisis as directly attributable to the outsourcing of flu vaccine production overseas, while the Bush campaign is blaming the high cost of liability insurance. Both sides have a point but are missing the bigger picture, which (surprise) makes the Bush administration look criminally negligent. America has had a flu season every year since, well, probably since we’ve been a country. We’ve had over 6 months to make a vaccine against this particular viral strain. And yet, we’ve run short. Imagine (drum roll) if this had been anthrax, VEE, or smallpox? Let’s assume the evildoers gave us 6 months notice: “Hey, we’re going to aerosolize some anthrax over all your major cities and airports, starting October 20th.” Would it be OK for the Bush administration to claim that vaccines weren’t available because the naughty Democrats were stalling tort reform?
This flu shot issue is a HUGE homeland defense failure. Any person over 65, or with a compromised immune system, or who works regularly with those populations, is officially LESS SAFE then he/she was 4 years ago, because 4 years ago we had enough flu vaccine. Why don’t we have emergency plans already in place? At this point in the war on terror, such a scenario should have been anticipated and planned for.
This administration’s neglect of the public health infrastructure, combined with a lack of imagination in funding vaccine development, could lead to hundreds of thousands of needless deaths this winter. If the Bush administration cannot protect the American public from the flu, a threat we’ve known about for months/years, how can we expect them to protect us against a biowarfare agent?
I have little add, except “we probably can’t.” And, I suppose, that there’s a implicit assumption in our public discourse that death by terrorism is a worse thing than death by other sources easily preventable by compatent policy-making. It seems near-impossible to defend such an assumption to me.