Health secretary: No flu vaccine crisis

[JPJones]

http://www.cnn.com/2004/HEALTH/10/18/flu/index.html

"The shortage of flu vaccine in the United States is "not a health crisis," Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson said, urging people to be patient as the government works to reallocate the nation's limited number of vaccines.

"I would like to tell individuals just be calm and don't stand in line, because we have approximately 24 million doses of vaccine that have not been shipped yet," Thompson said Sunday."

In other news, we've always been at war with Eastasia.

"But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -if all records told the same tale -- then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'."

[Dogmudgeon]

1. He is right, in one sense

24 million doses, gotten to the people who need them, will keep this from becoming a health crisis.

What Thompson didn't address was the incompetence of the Administration to have allowed so fundamental a problem to occur.

All it would have taken would have been a second source, and maybe a little bit of "pharmacovigilence". But I guess Team Bush has bigger fish to fry -- John Kerry's occasional verbal stumbles, non-existent terrists (and forgetting about the actual terrorists), hookers in New Orleans, and keeping teenage girls from getting sexuality information.

--bkl