Bum rap

Who would expect otherwise from the Republicans? They are predictably trying to exploit the delay in manufacturing enough H1N1 vaccine in order to slam Obama, saying this is his "Katrina moment."

That is a false parallel on so many counts.

Katrina was a failure because Bush had put an incompetent crony in charge, and because of the widespread lack of planning and coordination at all levels of government. They had the resources, they just didn't do what needed to be done.

With the flu vaccine, it is an entirely different problem and certainly not Obama's fault.

According to Barbara Ehrenreich's article in The Nation, the delay in vaccine production is almost entirely the fault of the private pharmaceutical companies who were given big government contracts to produce the vaccine and have not delivered.

The New York Times also says that it is primarily a problem in the private pharmaceutical companies, not the government. It seems to be a combination of problems: vaccine production is not very profitable for drug companies, so they don't push it and most of the U.S. companies don't do it at all, so the government has to rely on overseas companies, with less ability to influence them; the H1N1 virus apparently grows more slowly in the lab than was anticipated, adding to the delay; and one of the manufacturers in Australia was ordered by their government to keep its output for domestic use rather than fulfilling its U.S. contracts.

BigPharma also apparently misled the government in its overly optimistic estimates of how soon it could produce the vaccine, leading the government to promise it would have 160 million doses by the end of October. Instead, they had only 28 million doses ready. But the problem is getting the vaccine from the private sector.

The Republican mantra, however, is: "If the government can't get this right, how can you trust them with health care reform?" Our rebuttal should be: "If the private sector can't get this right, why do you want to keep the same system?"

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091116/ehrenreich

Ralph