Where’s the Outrage?
October 21, 2004
When the silence is deafening, it usually means everybody is guilty. The Department of Homeland Security is spending close to $40 billion this year and, in the next six months, more U.S. citizens will be dying from a cough than from all combined global terrorist activities...including casualties in Iraq. While at least half of the U.S. citizens seeking a flu vaccination will be denied one, what is your government doing? Literally...eating cake!
In a single week, America learned that: (1) Tom Ridge’s Transportation Security Administration (TSA) spent nearly $500,000.00 fêting a bunch of over-stuffed bureaucrats with $1850 cake; (2) if elected, “Tiny Tim” Edwards will make...lame beggars walk and blind men see; and (3) 50% of this nation’s flu vaccination supply is contaminated and must be destroyed. Can’t Edwards go into another Svengali-like trance and brew-up 50 million does of influenza vaccine?
During this same week, the U.S. citizenry was kept spellbound over: (1) John Kerry’s reference to “Dick Cheney's daughter, who is a lesbian”; (2) Bill O'Reilly’s sex life; and (3) Democrat-inspired preemptive strikes on voter intimidation. With an average number of 36,000 Americans expected to die from the flu this season, why is there no outrage over a government that has reduced the most elemental healthcare expectations into a Port-au-Prince food riot?
Finally, we have found a strictly bipartisan fiasco. With both political Parties spending hundreds of millions schlepping around the country promising plan after plan after plan to save us from ourselves, it turned out that we need to be saved from our government...the Executive, Legislative...the whole kit and caboodle.
In an odd morphing of Gerry Ford’s failed WIN mantra (Whip Inflation Now), Madame Hillary salvaged the Vaccines for Children Program (a.k.a. Whip Inoculations Now) from her disastrous attempt at a national healthcare coup d’état. With predictable results, the de facto price controls of Hillary’s 1993 plan have landed us in another WIN (Whip Influenza Now) conundrum. Ever notice that anytime politicians “WIN”...“You Lose”?
According to Robert Goldberg, director of the Manhattan Institute's Center for Medical Progress, the Vaccines for Children Program (VAC), “...buys up nearly 70 percent of all childhood vaccines at government-set prices and then distributes them to states according to a federal formula.” Goldberg concludes that, “The federally price-controlled bulk purchase of vaccines has decimated the vaccine industry.” In simple English, the government: takes your tax dollars; uses them to screw-up the vaccine industry; is about to take more of your tax dollars to fix their screw-up; and leaves the taxpayer with the bill and no flu shot. Doesn’t this sound like your government-managed retirement fund...a.k.a. Social security?
When President Bush tried to offer partial relief to vaccine manufacturers during the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the Democrats (and their trial lawyer buddies) cried some nonsense about Bush coddling special interests because his father was on the board of a pharmaceutical company. It really doesn’t take an IQ much above room temperature to figure out that a healthy vaccine industry is a necessity in the modern-day war on terrorism.
When Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist offered up the “Vaccine Affordability and Availability Act” in April of 2003, what did our esteemed Senators do? After reading the first section of the legislation entitled “AVAILABILITY OF INFLUENZA VACCINE”, the Senate “read twice and referred (the bill) to the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions”. Then they either went golfing with their lobbyist buddies or sat back and watched club-mate Kerry propose plan after plan after plan.
With all of the bipartisan finger pointing about WMD’s, dirty bomb threats, shipping container inspections, and airport profiling...did any lunatic in Washington ever stop to face the fact that if we weren’t able to stop 19 airborne lunatics from killing 3000 people on 9-11, how are we going to stop millions of people from spewing an airborne virus on each other in our subways, elevators, restaurants, and even churches.
Between plans, regulations and litigation...the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches of this country have accomplished a bipartisan destruction of the vaccine industry. Our government’s plans will cost us more lives and economic losses than in bin Laden’s wildest dreams.
In 1918, the Spanish flu killed more than 500,000 Americans. In 2004, we have a political campaign obsessed with the funding issues of futuristic stem cell research. In 2004, we have bureaucrats from the TSA drinking $64 per gallon coffee at a $500,000.00 party. In the winter of 2005, thousands will be needlessly dying as a direct result of their own government’s incompetence. And what is the response to this fiasco?
Both Presidential candidates have given the pledge not to seek flu shots for themselves and...the director of the multi-billon dollar Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Julie L. Gerberding says, “We're sorry for the people who need flu vaccine and may not be able to get it this year...That's disappointing for all of us.” Well, a sitting President without a flu shot is dumb, a Senator with a plan and no flu shot is dumber and Gerberding’s apology is useless. Oh please...there are enough martyrs in the Middle East, we don’t need any in Washington.
Enough is enough. I want the government out of my hair and out of the healthcare system. I work hard, pay taxes, pay a ransom for my health insurance and, never mind me...I can’t even find two flu shots for my World War II veteran parents. It would be such a relief if somebody...anybody...would rise to a Reaganesque level and do what has to be done without worrying about the whining weenies (media included). Damn it, I’m sick of finger-pointing and talking points...I want leadership.
A national emergency should be declared; unnecessarily cumbersome regulations tossed aside; government price-controls on vaccines abandoned; border immigration severely restricted; and gauze masks issued. We have to: gin up the vaccine producing industry with some greedy profit potential; keep unhygienic illegals and their bird flu out of the country; and slap a mask on Teresa’s face in time for Halloween.
As a teenager, I saw the miracle of Americans walking on the moon. The future was limitless. And now, over 30 years later, I find myself threatened by Islamic lunatics, Washington lunatics and a lunatic flu bug. What next...should I start worrying about the plague?
To steal a line from John Barrymore, “That’s the final irony...killed by a lunatic,” or, in this case, “lunatics”!
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