A Pandemic on Both Your Houses
A few months ago, it struck me as a good idea to write an article about the role of contract service providers in the vaccine market. After all, flu season was approaching, and Chiron’s production problems in 2004 seemed like a good jumping-off point to discuss the market. Then all heck broke loose, as avian flu began to crop up in Europe and more human infections occurred. Before we knew it, the president was making Big Announcements.
I should’ve figured something was up when I read the LA Times article about what books the president was taking with him on his summer vacation. While I was working on Proust, Flaubert and Hemingway, the president had a decidedly non-fiction approach to his break in Crawford, TX:
• Salt: A World History – Evidently, the ancient world’s dependence on salt can be paralleled with our contemporary oil industry.
• Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar – The reform-minded tsar—he freed 23 million slaves in 1860s Russia—survived six assassination attempts before the seventh caught up with him, a precursor to the modern terrorist (I’m sorry: “insurgent”) movement.
• The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History – 21 million people died in the 1918 plague, including 500,000 Americans, lowering our national life expectancy by 13 years.
That last one should’ve keyed us into the fact that the White House is really worried about that avian flu mutating into a human-to-human variant. It also should’ve prepared us for the Nov. 1 announcement of the White House’s “National Strategy To Safeguard Against the Danger of Pandemic Influenza.”
I believe that over-arching government intervention in healthcare issues tends to lead to more bad than good. In the article for this issue (starting on page 40), I mentioned a study by the National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine laying the blame for our weakened vaccine infrastructure on the Clinton administration’s “Vaccines for Children” initiative in 1993. So reading through the current administration’s $7.1 billion proposal for preventing a pandemic, I was a bit worried by the $2.5 billion portion allocated to purchasing flu vaccines and antiviral drugs, but since it didn’t mention forcing a 50% discount on the manufacturers, I figured we might not see another “unintended consequence” on the scale of the Clintons’ plan.
However, the White House’s strategy pushed in the opposite direction; it includes a provision to protect vaccine makers from liability in lawsuits. And this is one of those provisions that makes my teeth hurt. It’s like when the Department of Homeland Security was established, and one of the key points was that some employees moved into the DHS would no longer be protected by the same civil service employment rules that prevail in other departments. I understand the arguments that the administration uses to defend this proposal—namely, that litigation puts a burden on vaccine makers to the point at which they are willing to drop out of the market—but it’s one of those things that just so reflexively screams, “BIG BUSINESS!” as to live up to all those GOP stereotypes.
So we’re swinging on a pendulum. The previous administration’s technocracy micromanaged prices to the point at which most companies stopped serving the market (or consolidated out of existence), and the current one believes that removing consumers’ legal recourse will bring them back. It’s enough to make you want to vote libertarian! (Okay: nothing is enough to make people vote libertarian, but you get my point.)
Gil Y. Roth
Editor
gil@rodpub.com
