Posted on 10/18/2004 5:38:48 PM PDT by Kaslin
New York Sen. Hillary Clinton is blasting the Bush administration for the flu vaccine shortage, despite her own role in causing the crisis with her health care reforms in the 1990s.
"They're more interested in tax cuts for the rich than for flu shots for everyone who needs them," Clinton railed Monday afternoon at a press conference at New York's Ryan/Chelsea-Clinton Community Health Center.
"This administration has their priorities wrong," she added. "And we've really paid a big price for their negligence." But according to the Wall Street Journal, though Hillarycare as a whole crashed and burned in 1994, the former first lady was able to change the laws governing the manufacture of vaccines.
And the results have been disastrous.
During last fall's flu vaccine shortage, the Journal noted:
"The reason for today's shortage - as well as seven previous preventive vaccine shortages since 2000 - is that there are just five vaccine makers. This lack of suppliers is partly thanks to Hillary Clinton, who as first lady turned government into the majority buyer of vaccines and pushed prices so low as to make business unsustainable."
In July 2003 the Journal noted that the problem goes back to 1993, when Mrs. Clinton's "Vaccines for Children Program" was first implemented.
The vaccine crusade was being pushed at the time by Mrs. Clinton's Children's Defense Fund mentor Marian Wright Edelman - even though U.S. child vaccination rates in the early 1990s were considered relatively high by medical experts.
But that didn't stop Sen. Clinton and her "reformers." She pressured Congress to back her plan in a bid to make vaccines more available to poor, uninsured and underinsured children. In the process she turned the government into the major purchaser and distributor of vaccines.
Not only did Sen. Clinton's reform fail to result in any noticeable increase in childhood vaccination rates, it managed to drive down financial incentives for private companies to develop and produce vaccines.
A year after the Journal's report on Sen. Clinton's crusade, the number of manufactures producing flu vaccine has declined to just two.
Good Job !! A good plan !.........:o)
When did it become a must to get a flu shot every year?
Look up 'Chutzpah' in the dictionary and you'll see that hag's picture!
I'm with you. I've never had the flu (knock wood), and I'm a drug rep, in and out of clinics all day in the winter. The vaccine is always a year behind, anyway...
Huh? What is she talking about?
(Just give the entire Middle East some Zoloft)
Luv your tagline, can't we figure out a way to slip some zoloft into their Ramadan juice?
Except now I'm thinkin' they really need an antipsychotic and an intravenous benzodiazepine. Maybe Hitlery could manage to provide them with these meds the way she got every child vaccinated...LOL
"intravenous benzodiazepine"
@@ ! Whoa nellie, that sounds like the mother load of all prescripts.
Every year, people get the flu and the story goes, "this year's vaccine does not cover that particular strain..."
I do think that is rather ironic --- people standing in lines (with the other people most likely to be catching the flu), rushing to public places and doctors' offices to breath the same air as others who are vaccine-dependent. It's gotten completely stupid --- if they stayed home and away from public places they'd likely not encounter the virus --- and people have become so dense, they need the government to tell them to put on masks to avoid the flu if they must go into public places.
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One interesting thing I read about the 1917-1918 worldwide flu pandemic was this. Older people didn't catch it, and didn't die from it, at anywhere near the rates of younger people (18-40.) The reason, it's thought, is because in the late 1800s there was a "mini-pandemic" in parts of Asia, Europe, and the US. Younger people who were exposed in the late 1800s and survived grew up to be the older adults who were more resistant. Those born *after* the circa 1880s pandemic had no resistance to the 1917-1918 flu, and thus had more deaths.
It seems to me that allowing oneself to get the flu as a younger, healthier person would build antibodies that would still work when one *was* older and sicker.
It also seems that there has to be an oncoming major disaster --- Y2K didn't turn out to be one, West Nile spread through the population and didn't turn out to be a disaster --- and they never did get that vaccine produced.
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BUT YOU CAN'T TAKE AMBULANCE-CHASING OUT OF THE BOY 
COPYRIGHT MIA T 2004 |
Off Topic
But are you watching Lawrence O'Donnell about Bush's faith, prayers and God??
Did he just compare it to Muhammad Atta??
Great work
Even in 1918 there were two waves of that flu --- the first wave was a milder version --- I wonder if those who caught that and developed antibodies were protected from that second more virulent wave that came in the fall?
It's a good idea to have your natural immunity built up and that gives you better cross-immunity. I also wonder with that flu in 1918 if there were other factors that caused the deaths -- secondary diseases --- possibly spread by health care workers? Overcrowded conditions? Remedies that actually made the disease worse?
"the Hildebeast would be too old to run after Kerry's 2nd term!!!!"
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Yes, that is exactly right -- and why I am suprised we have not seen the BIG HILLARY TORPEDO....TO SINK KERRY. It is do or die for Hillary, based on a Kerry win/loss.
"Yeah um well, that only works since they pay so many homeless and crackheads with cash or drugs to be available for busing and photo op protesting. The rest of us have to work at real jobs for a living. "
LOL! Very true, very true.
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