America is getting a preview of what a national health care system would be like in this country, courtesy of the bungled distribution of the H1N1 virus vaccine.
Buoyed by a $16 million media blitz, the Centers for Disease Control held nearly a dozen nationwide forums in several U.S. cities before Labor Day to convince the masses that they needed the swine flu vaccine.
The campaign targeted young people under 24, pregnant women, and individuals with special medical conditions, as they were to be the first priority for the new vaccine.
Here we are two months later, and, availability of the vaccine is spotty at best. Clearly, the national response to swine flu has been an abject failure.
Here’s why:
First, local county health departments have to approve distribution to schools, companies, hospitals, etc. These local health offices get their marching orders from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The federal office is so inundated with requests that approvals are coming in fits and starts. You can have one school district get a plentiful supply, while another just a few miles away must wait several days if not weeks.
In Lodi, California, Lodi Memorial Hospital announced in early October that H1N1 vaccines would be available later in the month, while encouraging everyone to at least get a regular influenza shot. When contacted on Friday, Nov. 6, the hospital was still awaiting a shipment.
As of Nov. 9, Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Inc. – California’s largest HMO that covers more than 8.5 million people – had not received a single dose of the vaccine. Yet corporations such as Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Time-Warner received large shipments before area hospitals.
Huh?
It gets better. While millions of children do not have access to the vaccine in their own schools and neighborhoods, President Obama’s two daughters, ages 11 and 8, were among the first D.C. schoolchildren to get the vaccine – three weeks ago. As of Nov. 9, the Obama kids were among only 6 percent of youths age 16 and under to get the vaccine in the greater D.C. area.
In late October, the U.S. received 8.4 million more doses of the vaccine, but Centers for Disease Control Director Thomas Frieden admitted that it’s still too hard for people who need the vaccine to get it. Frieden also noted that there were more than 22 million doses of the vaccine available to the public by Oct. 27, and that the government has ordered 225 million doses. Are the feds sending out the doses by stagecoach? Horse and buggy?
At this rate, the Yankees will probably be playing in the 2011 World Series before the full compliment of dosage is distributed to the public.
This is an absolute travesty, a boondoggle of epic proportions because several people have died in the last 3 months from H1N1, more children are infected, and few places are offering the vaccine.
And where is the media? Playing rope-a-dope with the public, basically giving the Obama Administration a collective pass.
Friends, what we’re witnessing is a trial run, a preview if you will, of what government-sponsored rationing of medicine will look like if the version of health care reform passed in early November by the House of Representatives becomes law.
The haves will get it first, well-ahead of the have-nots. And every citizen in this country should be calling their elected state and Congressional representatives right now and demanding accountability. This is a first-class back flip by the Obama government into the shallow end of credulity.
Pertinent question: Had this mishandling occurred under a Republican president’s watch, would the media – and the public — be so forgiving?
I think not.
~ By Frank Gilmore