Making Hay Out Of A Sow's Ear
(Medical • The Duh Files)
Now that my family, the neighbors, my kids’ school teachers, our cousins, their school teachers, their friends, the churches, our acquaintances in Dallas, their churches, their places of employment, their work-out gyms – now that half of Texas has already caught The Other White Meat Flu and passed it on – now the vaccine arrives.
If you can call 142,000 doses in a state with just shy of 25 million people an arrival. I’d call it a joke, if there was a funny punchline. In Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city, they got 600 doses. San Antonio got 500. According to reports, no one has been allowed to snort any of this nasal-mist version yet. I hear the governor’s office is making a list of Really Super Important People first.
“Clearly at this point, where we have only some vaccine and not everybody can receive that vaccine, demand is outstripping supply, said Centers of Disease Control
Because duh, by the time Texas’ share of the stuff appears on the horizon, every last one of us will have had the pandemic. (See earlier rant here; I’m not in the mood to launch into this one again.)
Except to briefly re-mention that the CDC’s reliance on a tiny handful of vaccine-making companies has not only resulted in swine flu vaccine not arriving until no one needs it any more, it has also caused a shortage of seasonal flu vaccine.
Which is why it was so heartening to see Sugar Land Mayor Jimmy Thompson turning the pandemic scare into a marketing moment.
“Mayor Leads by Example to Encourage Flu Prevention,” the press-release headline said. Turns out the city health director was able to scrape up enough seasonal flu vaccine to give Jimmy a shot.
It was a “measure intended as a public relations stunt health alert to encourage citizens to follow the mayor’s example,” we are told, even though it turns out a lot of us couldn’t follow the mayor’s example if we wanted to, because there’s a shortage or absence of both vaccines.
As for city “public health authority” Dr. Joe Anzaldua, he helpfully tells us, “Taking advantage of both vaccinations combined with simple precautionary hygiene may well prevent a rapid and widespread outbreak in our community.”
Except for the fact that we’re already in the middle of one.
→ B.Dunn, Oct 07, 2009, 03 51 PM
