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Wednesday, October 05, 2005

Why do something about avian flu when you can use it as an excuse for martial law?
Posted by Jill | 6:39 AM

C-Plus Caligula (OK, Barry should be happy now) lost no time musing yesterday about the use of the military to enforce quarantine as the FIRST line of defense against avian flu. Given his past musings about how much easier it would be if he were dictator, one has to wonder how much of his Administration's inattention to this very real threat (as opposed to the ones he pulled out of his ass and for which he took us to war) is because, like the threat that resulted in 9/11, it would work to his advantage for it to play out.

WaPo:

Health officials have warned for years that a virulent bird flu could kill millions of people, but few in Washington have seemed alarmed. After a closed-door briefing last week, however, fear of an outbreak swept official Washington, which was still reeling from the poor response to Hurricane Katrina.

The day after the briefing, led by Michael O. Leavitt, the secretary of Health and Human Services, and other senior government health officials, the Senate squeezed $3.9 billion for flu preparations into a Pentagon appropriations bill.

On Wednesday, Senate Democrats plan to introduce another bill calling for the creation of a flu pandemic coordinator within the White House and a federal buy-back program for unused flu vaccines, among other measures, according to a draft of the bill. Its authors include the Senate minority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada; Senator Barack Obama of Illinois; and Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts.

Thirty-two Democratic senators sent a letter to President Bush on Tuesday expressing "grave concern that the nation is dangerously unprepared for the serious threat of avian influenza."

Mr. Bush spent a considerable part of his news conference Tuesday talking about the risks of an outbreak and the measures the administration is considering to combat one, including whether to use the military to enforce quarantines.

"I take this issue very seriously," he said. "The people of the country ought to rest assured that we're doing everything we can."

But after the administration's widely criticized response to Hurricane Katrina, such assurances are no longer enough, several Democratic senators said.

" 'Trust us' is not something the administration can say after Katrina," Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, said in an interview. "I don't think Congress is in a mood to trust. We want plans. We want specific goals and procedures we're going to take to prepare for this."


Now, I'm going to do something that you will never see a conservative blogger do in a similar post. I'm going to also point out the way the previous administration, headed by a president from my own party, also dropped the ball on avian flu, as cited in The Nation:

Under Democrats as well as Republicans, Washington has looked the other way as local health departments have lost funding and crucial hospital "surge capacity" has been eroded in the wake of the HMO revolution. The government has also refused to address the growing lack of new vaccines and antibiotics caused by the pharmaceutical industry's withdrawal from sectors it considers to be insufficiently profitable; moreover, revolutionary breakthroughs in vaccine design and manufacturing technology have languished because of lack of sponsorship by either the government or the drug industry.


The first human case of avian flu occurred in 1997. The antiviral drugs Relenza and Tamiflu were licensed in the U.S. in 1999. So a potential infrastructure has been in place since yes, the end of the Clinton Administration, to address the problem by stockpiling vaccine. But it has been more important to the Bush Administration to kill Iraqis and cut taxes for the wealthy than to institute policies to PREVENT an epidemic that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans -- far, far more than even the body count of 9/11. Instead, public health efforts have been invested solely in protecting Americans against Saddam Hussein's nonexistent biological agents:


Certainly the leading influenza researchers, from the first H5N1 outbreak in 1997, have been doing their utmost to alert medical colleagues worldwide to the urgent threat of avian flu, as well as outlining the immediate steps the Bush Administration and other governments needed to take. As befitted his position as "pope" of influenza researchers, Robert Webster of Saint Jude Hospital in Memphis tirelessly preached the same sermon: "If a pandemic happened today, hospital facilities would be overwhelmed and understaffed because many medical personnel would be afflicted with the disease. Vaccine production would be slow because many drug-company employees would also be victims. Critical community services would be immobilized. Reserves of existing vaccines, M2 inhibitors and NA inhibitors would be quickly depleted, leaving most people vulnerable to infection."

Webster stressed the particular urgency of increasing the production and stockpiling of the NA inhibitor Tamiflu. Because this strategic antiviral was "in woefully short supply"--it is made by Roche at a single factory in Switzerland--Webster and his colleagues underlined the need for resolute government action: "The cost of making the drugs, as opposed to the price the pharmaceutical companies charge consumers, would not be exorbitant. Such expenditure by governments would be a very worthwhile investment in the defense against this debilitating and often deadly virus." Failure to act would mean intense competition over the small inventory of life-saving Tamiflu. "Who should get these drugs?" Webster asked. "Healthcare workers and those in essential services, obviously, but who would identify those? There would not be nearly enough for those who needed them in the developed world, let alone the rest of the world's population."

Webster wasn't calling for miracles, just prudent action to insure an adequate antiviral stockpile. But for almost three years he and other influenza experts were ignored, as were those who argued more generally that "the best way to manage bioterrorism is to improve the management of existing public-health threats." The Bush Administration instead fast-tracked vaccination programs for smallpox and anthrax, based on fanciful scenarios that might have embarrassed Tom Clancy. In reality, the biodefense boom was designed to build support for the invasion of Iraq by sowing the fear that Saddam Hussein might use germ warfare against the United States. In any event, Washington spent $1 billion expanding a smallpox vaccine stockpile that some experts claim was already quite sufficient. Hundreds of thousands of GIs were forced to undergo the vaccinations, but front-line health workers--the second tier of the smallpox campaign--largely boycotted the Administration's attempts to cajole "voluntary" participation.

In spite of this fiasco and millions of doses of unused vaccine, the Administration pressed ahead with the development of second-generation smallpox and anthrax vaccines, as well as vaccines for such exotic plagues as ebola fever; it continued to reject the "all hazards" strategy recommended by most public-health experts in favor of a so-called "siloed approach" that focused on a short list of possible bioweapons. In testimony before the House of Representatives, Tommy Thompson explained that while "private investment should drive the development of most medical products," only the government was in a position to develop those products that "everyone hopes...will never be needed" as a protection against "rare yet deadly threats." The government, in other words, was willing to spend lots of money on biological threats that were unlikely or farfetched but not on antivirals or new antibiotics for the diseases that were actually most menacing, like avian flu.


And now what is his plan? Martial law. One can just imagine the woody he gets at the mere thought.
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