Politics: Bush, Kerry, and flu shots

I already said I'm tired of Kerry talking about the draft, not b/c I don't think his argument has merit (I do absolutely), but b/c it's too hard politically to justify his statements and too easy for Bush to deny it. Here's another example of Kerry being dumb and saying something indefensible and stupid:

What's happening with the flu vaccine is really an example of everything this administration does — deny it, pretend it's not there, and then try to hide it when it comes out and act surprised.

In my recent memory, George Bush has only said two things that weren't arrogant, stupid, and obstructive to the spirit of honesty. The first was when he honestly admitted that the object of the War on Terror wasn't 'to win' but to neutralize terrorist threats to a minimum. The second was Bush's handling of the flu vaccine question at the last debate, in which just about everything he said was dead on (except that when he implied that legal reform was the answer to rising malpractice costs, which is a simplistic and tiresome assertion).

In this country, it most certainly is difficult for a company to manufacturer vaccines. They aren't very profitable, to begin with. And the legal liability IS huge. So sure, most American pharmaceuticals, with plenty of exceptions, steer clear of developing them and manufacturing them.

So, in this one isolated case, it might make the most sense for public health to give some sort of legal protection to pharm companies, because vaccines are inherently dangerous prophylactics (to no fault of the pharm companies) as long as patients are warned of the possibility that something bad could happen, but the chances of something bad happening if they don't take the vaccine is even greater.

To be clearer, let's toss out some hypotheticals. Let's say a vaccine is estimated to save 100 lives in 100,000 people who take it (and probably 250 lives in children under 12, and 350 lives in the eldery/100K doses). That same vaccine is estimated to kill 2 people for every 100,000 people who take it. Given that it's better from a public health standpoint to have the vaccine than to not, and given that the two lawsuits for the two people who died would probably cost more than the profits from selling 100,000 doses of vaccine, what American company in their right mind would want to waste its efforts for a loss? Not many.

This isn't to say pharm companies shouldn't be sued for negligence or for holding back information--they most certainly should. But, uniquely, we accept the small dangers of vaccines to get the good of them. And typically, we're very up front with patients about the risks (and if we're not, that's bad).

So is the flu shot vaccine crisis a microcosm for the negligence of the Bush administration? If we hold them to a standard of perfection, maybe. It would have certainly made sense for a Republican president w/ a Republican congress to have done something about this situation, which hasn't exactly been a secret with regards to other vaccines. In fact, I have no idea why they didn't. But bottomline, the chances of a Gore administration correcting this situation seem negligible as well.

So if we want our vaccines manufactured in the United States where the FDA can at least have some nominal oversight, then companies are going to require some sort of legal protection to make it profitable. And who knows, we may even get better vaccines. Though that's unlikely, since most vaccine research is federally funded anyway. Some things are best left to the government, since the competition involved in manufacturing 'better' vaccines could wind up pretty dangerous in clinical trials when all the 'worse' ones get tested. And I'd prefer to kill as few patients as possible.