“I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people telling me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis.”–Glenn Reynolds
Fox News, Fair and Balanced:
President Obama signed a proclamation declaring the H1N1 influenza a national emergency, giving doctors and medical facilities greater leeway in responding to the flu pandemic.
“National Emergency”? Baloney. They sure don’t act like it.
“Socialized Medicine”? We’ve already got it with vaccines. And that’s why there’s a shortage.
Nurse Bloomberg:
Swine flu vaccine supplies in the U.S. are being hindered by production delays at two drugmakers, and GlaxoSmithKline Plc’s failure to gain regulatory approval for its product, a government official said. …
Besides Glaxo and AstraZeneca Plc, both based in London, Sanofi-Aventis SA of Paris, Novartis AG in Basel, Switzerland, and CSL Ltd. of Melbourne provide the bulk of the U.S. supply. …
Novartis Chief Executive Officer Daniel Vasella, in an interview on CNBC yesterday, said that most of his company’s vaccine may not reach the U.S. until the first quarter of 2010. The Swiss company is the largest supplier to the U.S. …
“The utility of the vaccine will be much less at that point,” said William Schaffner, chairman of the department of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. “The virus will have gotten to most places before the vaccine” based on how rapidly it is now spreading in most of the country. …
One “positive surprise” for public health officials was getting a larger than expected delivery of the nasal spray version of the vaccine, made by AstraZeneca’s MedImmune Inc. unit in Gaithersburg, Maryland, Lurie said.
Yes, there have been technical issues. But we’ve driven most of the American companies out of the vaccine business.
Hoover’s Dr. Henry I. Miller from 2005:
Why can’t a country that developed the atomic bomb (60 years ago) and the polio vaccine (50 years ago) and put a man on the moon (almost 40 years ago) now produce an appropriate vaccine?
The reason is that flawed public policy from the Congress and the government’s Executive Branch has ensured low return on investment and high exposure to legal liability for vaccines. The predictable result: U.S. vaccine R&D and production have been decimated.
What kinds of policies? The Vaccines for Children Program, for example, was a do-gooder innovation of the Clinton administration (Hillary’s toe in the water for national health care, apparently) that disrupted market forces and dealt a blow to vaccine producers. Established in 1994, it created a single-buyer system for children’s vaccines, making the government by far the largest purchaser of childhood vaccines — at a mandated discount of 50 percent. Try extorting that kind of discount from manufacturers of trucks for the U.S. Postal Service or of Meals-Ready-to-Eat (MREs) for the Department of Defense, and see how long the companies bid on government contracts.
Memo to Senator Clinton: It doesn’t take a village, just good old American ingenuity combined with the expectation of a decent return on investment.
Arbitrary and excessive regulation is another obstacle. The highly risk-averse FDA has been especially tough on vaccines. The agency has rejected evidence of safety and efficacy from European and Canadian vaccine approvals; prematurely withdrawn life-saving products from the market because of mere perceptions of risk; and set the bar for the testing of new vaccines almost impossibly high.
As a result of our disastrous public policy, innovation has suffered and vaccine producers have abandoned the field in droves, leaving only four major American manufacturers and a few dozen products. As of the last flu season, there were only two producers of injectable flu vaccine for the U.S. market, for example, both using antiquated technology.
And we wonder why there are shortages.
This is just a taste what’s in store if we let government take over all health care.
What is true of vaccines now will be true of EVERY drug and medical product.
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