(In response to “Clock Ticking on Vaccine Options”)

On October 31, the Bush administration proposed a $7.1 billion plan called the “National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza” to fight the potential pandemic avian flu. The key plan was to make an avian flu vaccine known as Tamiflu, for every American. Soon after the proposal was announced, analyst from talk shows, the newspapers, and academic institutions began to unfold some major flaws that underlie Bush’s agenda.

First and foremost is that the United States does not have the manufacturing capacity to produce that much vaccine within the given amount of time. According to the World Health Organization, most countries in the world are not prepared to protect itself during a pandemic even with an advance warning that has lasted for nearly two years. The U.S. and several other countries are planning on purchasing large quantities of vaccines from manufacturers but the only problem is that it is physically impossible to fill these orders immediately. Sam Jaffe from Wired News predicts that it would be at least 2011 before every American could be vaccinated against a bird flu pandemic.

In a recent article on BostonHerald.com, Dr. John Abramson, believes that the best way to minimize the risk of a bird flu pandemic is to stop the virus at its source. Most farmers in the Southeast Asian countries (where the infection originated) are poorly educated and do not have the understanding of how to dispose the sick birds properly. He criticizes the government for favoring resolutions that are most lucrative to the drug industry rather than what is most useful for the public health. He points out that the current defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld was once the CEO of Gilead Scientific, a company that owns about 10 percent of the rights to Tamiflu, and that he still owns somewhere between $5-25 million worth of Gilead stock. Dr. Abramson believes that instead of spending billions of dollars on the not-so-impressive Tamiflu, the Bush administration should allocate some of the spending on educating and paying the farmers on properly disposing of their sick birds.

Dr. Sandra Gadson, the president of the National Medical Association, also criticizes the President’s plan for repeating the same mistakes seen during the federal response to Hurricane Katrina (article link). Dr. Gadson says the plan fails to “take into account the higher vulnerability of minority communities to public health crises and well-documented racial and ethnic barriers to healthcare and public health services, including influenza vaccinations.” If minorities are already having problems getting healthcare under normal circumstances, it is obvious that they would have an even bigger problem in getting public health services during a crisis.

With the clock ticking, our government really needs to focus its attention on some of these issues before it is too late.