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I think it's interesting that the Bush plan foir the flu is all about what to do in the case of failure, and not much about what to do to prevent failure.
First of all, there's a reason we have vaccine shortages. Vaccines are low-cost, low-profit items produced in a system which is geared for profit maximization. They are produced by companies which sort of resent making them, andn they never make enough because if they make too much they'll be stuck. The crisis last year occurred because the government refused to listen to the doubts of the supplier about its product and would not act in time to allow them to fix the situation before flu shot season: and by the time it was no longer possible to avoid knowing that there was a problem, instead of cleaning up and starting over, the line had to be shut down, and the only other flu vaccine producing plant had to take up the slack as best it could, months later than they should have.
This is clearly an instance of where the profit system is not sufficient. In order to be effective, vaccines need to be cheap or free and universally available, and those characteristics are antithetical to maximizing profit.
The flu type prediction system has not been working as badly as you might think from reading just some of the news. It's young yet, and is not nearly good enough, but with decent public health measures, it can make a huge difference.
Decent public health measures do not start and end with vaccines and the threat of quarantine (about which more later). Public institutions like schools in the United States need to be much better equipped for hygiene, for example. You go into a public school in a poor neighborhood -- try going into the kids' bathrooms. You'll be shocked. There's no hot water, no soap, and frequently no paper towels in many of them. The custodian budget is slashed and there's not enough custodian hours to keep the trash emptied and the surfaces cleaned. In many cases the bathrooms are locked except during passing periods, or some of them are locked at any one time. This means that hundreds, sometimes thousands, of children are trying to get through the bathrooms in a few minutes. Can you say filth?
Or bus stations.
You can't have cleanliness without spending money on labor and supplies, and you can't stave off an epidemic without cleanliness.
People need to stay home when they first feel ill -- that's when they're contsagious, not a week later when they're exhausted from going sick to work or school. People need to have sick leave that allows them to do this. People need to have childcare benefits that include hiring a babysitter for the days the kid's too ill for daycare. Sick-child babysitters need to have their wages subsidized so they can afford to do that for a living. Old people need the same kind of resources.
All of these expenditures are, coincidentally enough, of the economy-stimulating type, unlike cutting the taxes of the superrich. -- it's always better for the economy to raise the income of those at the bottom, because they don't already have everything, and they're likely to spend that new income on stuff that causes other people to be hired somewhere.
Okay, so what about quarantine, anyway? It's a tool in the toolkit of public health, okay. There should be plans for implementing it whben it's the right thing to do -- but who should have those plans is the Centers for Disease Control, who, by the way, already have the legal authority to declare quarantine and to commandeer any military they need to enforce it or to do whbatever labor needs to be done. That's already there. Bush doesn't need to take that power to himself, or place it in the hands of the army. He may be commander in chief, but the CDC trumps him and should.
Reading the transcript of Bush's speech last week -- I must admit I can't stand to listen to his nasty little whiny voice -- I got the disctinct impression that when he says "quarantine" he means massive martial law, and that's not reasonable. Just as it's unreasonable to expect that there will be riots over flu vaccines, unless you plan to make the flu vaccines scarce and unfairly distributed and smirk all over the place about how there's no plan to make them better available.
It's all just an excuse for another power grab. IUt's not a plan to keep a population as healthy as possible.
First of all, there's a reason we have vaccine shortages. Vaccines are low-cost, low-profit items produced in a system which is geared for profit maximization. They are produced by companies which sort of resent making them, andn they never make enough because if they make too much they'll be stuck. The crisis last year occurred because the government refused to listen to the doubts of the supplier about its product and would not act in time to allow them to fix the situation before flu shot season: and by the time it was no longer possible to avoid knowing that there was a problem, instead of cleaning up and starting over, the line had to be shut down, and the only other flu vaccine producing plant had to take up the slack as best it could, months later than they should have.
This is clearly an instance of where the profit system is not sufficient. In order to be effective, vaccines need to be cheap or free and universally available, and those characteristics are antithetical to maximizing profit.
The flu type prediction system has not been working as badly as you might think from reading just some of the news. It's young yet, and is not nearly good enough, but with decent public health measures, it can make a huge difference.
Decent public health measures do not start and end with vaccines and the threat of quarantine (about which more later). Public institutions like schools in the United States need to be much better equipped for hygiene, for example. You go into a public school in a poor neighborhood -- try going into the kids' bathrooms. You'll be shocked. There's no hot water, no soap, and frequently no paper towels in many of them. The custodian budget is slashed and there's not enough custodian hours to keep the trash emptied and the surfaces cleaned. In many cases the bathrooms are locked except during passing periods, or some of them are locked at any one time. This means that hundreds, sometimes thousands, of children are trying to get through the bathrooms in a few minutes. Can you say filth?
Or bus stations.
You can't have cleanliness without spending money on labor and supplies, and you can't stave off an epidemic without cleanliness.
People need to stay home when they first feel ill -- that's when they're contsagious, not a week later when they're exhausted from going sick to work or school. People need to have sick leave that allows them to do this. People need to have childcare benefits that include hiring a babysitter for the days the kid's too ill for daycare. Sick-child babysitters need to have their wages subsidized so they can afford to do that for a living. Old people need the same kind of resources.
All of these expenditures are, coincidentally enough, of the economy-stimulating type, unlike cutting the taxes of the superrich. -- it's always better for the economy to raise the income of those at the bottom, because they don't already have everything, and they're likely to spend that new income on stuff that causes other people to be hired somewhere.
Okay, so what about quarantine, anyway? It's a tool in the toolkit of public health, okay. There should be plans for implementing it whben it's the right thing to do -- but who should have those plans is the Centers for Disease Control, who, by the way, already have the legal authority to declare quarantine and to commandeer any military they need to enforce it or to do whbatever labor needs to be done. That's already there. Bush doesn't need to take that power to himself, or place it in the hands of the army. He may be commander in chief, but the CDC trumps him and should.
Reading the transcript of Bush's speech last week -- I must admit I can't stand to listen to his nasty little whiny voice -- I got the disctinct impression that when he says "quarantine" he means massive martial law, and that's not reasonable. Just as it's unreasonable to expect that there will be riots over flu vaccines, unless you plan to make the flu vaccines scarce and unfairly distributed and smirk all over the place about how there's no plan to make them better available.
It's all just an excuse for another power grab. IUt's not a plan to keep a population as healthy as possible.