Monday, October 03, 2005

Hardhearted Republicans Put Money Over Lives

I’ll bet that’s a headline you never thought you’d see here.

The other day Harry Reid was passionately on the floor of the Senate pleading for money to be included in a defense appropriation for the antiviral vaccine Tamiflu. 3 Billion or so. He was heartfelt, talked of his grandchildren and wife. There was palpable fear and trembling in his voice. His sincerity is not in question. If your family is at risk of dying when a pandemic of Avian Flu breaks out you will be too. His plea was, we have to do something, anything. This threat is real. Avian Flu is coming.

The problem is the “we have to do something” action is meaningless. Tamiflu is useless. If you google up Avian Flu there are 20 Tamiflu advertisements that will pop up. They are all snake oil. Don’t waste your money. They are sugar pills essentially. Expensive ineffective panaceas.

Great Britain has spent 300+ million dollars stockpiling Tamiflu. Wasted money.

The Republicans were sympathetic but unwilling to allocate money for something that is useless. The Democrats were incensed. They claim that money was being saved and that it would cost lives. I submit they need to go back to college and learn something than how to be a lawyer. Science is still a course last I looked.

I know something about viral genetic mutation. What must happen is a clearly identifiable replicating strain of Avian Flu being transmitted successfully between humans has to be isolated. At that point the ova based production of vaccine gets underway. We will be racing the clock (8-10 months) to have enough to do some good in wide range inoculation.

If we are lucky and the flu doesn’t move thru the population too fast due to effective quarantine methodology we may just be able to inoculate enough people against the virus to whip this. If we don’t millions, maybe a billion will die.

If we are going to spend any money before that time it would be best spent preparing the infrastructure for production that once the mutation is stabilized and begins spreading so we can begin effective specific antiviral production of a flu shot that is effective against this killer. Keep up on this here.

This is a crapshoot, but putting all your money on the table with no chance at winning at all is a bad gamble.

No comments: