This Washington Post article has some startling figures about the President's campaign to innoculate emergency responders and health practictioners to smallpox. You may remember that the administration had sought to convince about 400,000 people to voluntarily take the FDA-approved vaccine, and less than 10 percent did. Well, maybe the majority was right to be worried.
Just 38,000 first responders came forward, and since then, Bush and other high-ranking officials have rarely mentioned the effort. More than 75,000 doses of expired vaccine have been discarded.
"The program still exists," Mootrey said. "However, it's up to the states to determine whether they wish to have any potential response team members vaccinated."
Of those immunized, 822 reported an adverse reaction, though the vast majority were complaints of itching, pain or rash that dissipated quickly, according to the article, being published in today's edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association. One hundred cases, or 12 percent, were designated as serious. Those included six heart attacks, two of which were fatal, and 21 cases of nonfatal inflammation of the heart muscle.
Now, I've had to listen to the psuedo-science "facts" of those military personnel that don't want to take the chance of what the anthrax vaccine, a tested and validated medical drug, might do to them and their post-military careers in the commercial air industry. I've also read the NAS report on the anthrax vaccine issues. More than 800,000 military personnel have received doses of anthrax vaccine. That's twenty times the number of smallpox recipients, and yet no fatal cases, no inflammation of heart muscles, no heart attacks or lifethreatening health cases. Of course, the military may be more healthy than the general population, but you get the point. More DOD info here.
But I'm not here to preach about the anthrax vaccine. I'd rather point to the foolishness of our political leadership giving into their worst fears in the idea that they should try to vaccinate an entire population or even a significant portion of a population against a disease that might not even exist as a threat to humans, and trying to do that with untested, potentially dangerous vaccines. We spent billions on tested and approved anthrax and smallpox vaccines, and the results are less than adequate. Would you trust DHHS passing out an untested anthrax vaccine or smallpox vaccine, as the BioShield Act would allow then? What do you think these results of these preparations for avian flu are going to lead?
We do need a good public health plan for biological disease outbreaks, and this government isn't giving us one. Remember the Feb 03 mad rush to the Home Depots for plastic sheets and duct tape? The madness is already starting...
The threat of a flu pandemic has led governments and public health ministries around the world to make plans.
"Pandemics happen," U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt says. There have been 10 in the past 300 years, he says, and "we're overdue and underprepared" for the next one.
His agency has advised Americans to plan "as you would for other public health emergencies."
I'm sorry, did the lead government official for public health just say "shit happens"??
Yes, he did.
There is the consideration that if we vaccinated our whole population against smallpox or whatever, then we could use a WMD with those antigens fairly safely.
Of course since we're the good guys, we wouldn't do that unless we absolutely needed to.
And history supports us. After the swine flu vaccinations we didn't spread a swine flu pandemic. So that's a mark in our favor.
Posted by: J Thomas | 08 December 2005 at 08:44 PM