We saw how the left beat down the reputations of any and everyone in order to excuse their own depravity.

 

Smeering Bush, Lincoln, Jefferson, etc is necessary for our left wing to be acceptable.

Probably because most of our flu vaccine production has been outsourced (YEAAAAAAH GLOBALIZATION). 

 

"http://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&channel=s&hl=en&source=hp&q=outsourcing+of+US+flu+vaccines&btnG=Google+Search"

The hospitals can be sued, as well as the importers, if the foreign made vaccines are tainted.  And dosage administration, especially for kids, is crucial.  Missteps of that sort can cripple people, enough adults go down in the US military during mandatory flu vaccination season.

 

I'd like to see some of these "frivilous" lawsuits.  I'll bet many of them involve giving too much, especially to a child, or the vaccine being tainted somehow.  

Neither reason is excusable and a big lawsuit is justifiable.  Maybe Eldnah would like to live somewhere where you have no protection or recourse against a defective product or medication, and filing lawsuit papers often results in a thug beat down when you get home.

 

Because that's the only possible result of reform of the standard tort practices of the legal system we are currently plagued with.

 

I love how Libs like Nan try to have it both ways.  On one hand he blames the inavailability of H1N1 vaccinations on globalization and international outsourcing, but can then with a seemingly straight face defends some of the outrageous lawsuits that have forced the same outsourcing he condemns. 

 Unfortunately medical research requires a lot of trial and error.  You can run all the computer simulations you want, and can even test drugs on rats and monkeys (at least for now), but the only true test of a drug is what happens when it is finally given to humans.  Unfortunately, sometimes human patients will react badly to the drug and some will die.  That is sad, but it is inevitable, and I doubt you will ever find a drug that is 100% effective for everyone and 100% safe.  The comeback to this is usually, "How would you feel if it was your child, mother/father, brother/sister, wife/husband, etc.?"  Well, I would feel awful and would want changes to make sure it doesn't happen to anyone else, but I also understand that human beings are fragile and that nobody gets out of life alive.  Pharmaceutical companies should be held responsible for the products they produce, but court judgements in the hundreds of millions of dollars are an abuse of the system and prevent the development of life saving vaccines and medications. 

Is Nan aware that the H1N1 vaccine is produced by a corporation?

 

Yeah, let's get rid of all the corporations and replace them with...I dunno, the government?  Wouldn't that make us pretty much the American version of the People's Republic of China, aka Nan's Antichrist?

 

I may be a stupid rightwinger for trusting corporations, but I trust them a hell of a lot more than government.  Corporations at least have to watch the free market.

 

Frankly all of you are completely incorrect in why it has taken 6 months for the H1N1 vaccine to come along.  Its not globalization, evil corporate greed, greedy trial lawyers.  Its basic freaking biology.

 

We are very, very good at producing flu vaccine.  We do it twice a year, every year.  H1N1 uses the same tried and true tech and procedures, they just swapped out the content with the necessary strain and, voila, theres your vaccine.

 

The problem is, it takes six damn months to ramp this stuff up.  Here is why:

 

1)  You can't just decide "ok, we are going to make a vaccine now." and throw any old virus in there.  You have to run serological studies of the strains you have (which you get from patients) against samples that are sent in.  To get a more effective vaccine you have to actually wait a bit and make sure that the vaccine you are creating will be effective against what your trying to vaccinate.  The bi-annual vaccines use a bunch of statistics based on circulation trends to figure out which strains will be dominant and make an educated guess.  Thats why some years the vaccine is better than others: sometimes the model is correct, sometimes its less so.

 

Even though the swine flu is H1N1 there can easily be several sub-types of it.  Thus, you couldnt just take the first kid who coughed and use his virus.  You had to wait.  Lets call that delay #1.  This part is handled by the Government.

 

2)  Once you figure out the virus you want you then have to grow it up.  Vaccines are composed of killed virus.  In order to kill it, you have to make it.  This is the second bottleneck.  Growing this up takes a good long time because it must be done in chicken eggs.  The reason why you use chicken eggs instead of tissue culture is because there is not a tissue culture type that has been approved for use in humans.  When I was in flu two years back there were always rumors of people working on a tissue culture alternative in vaccine production but nothing seems to ever materialize.  The production phase is handled by the companies.

 

The standard time frame for typical vaccine production is 6 months from our decision of what flu subtypes go into it until it goes out for distribution.  Analysis to determine what strains go into it take about 6 months prior to the "vaccine decision."  If you work in flu, you are ALWAYS working your ass off.  Since H1N1 has only been around for 6 months thats a rather good time frame.  Especially because the standard flu vaccines are still being produced.

 

Well short of being incompetant the Feds have done an excellent job of responding to this, getting a response organized, and at trying to release good, timely information.  The response has been measured, reasonable, and every move well founded and thought out.  The only people screaming about this from the hilltops are the news networks craving ever higher ratings.

 

Flu and the government response to it is a good argument FOR government healthcare, rather than against it. 

Oh, and one more thing.  If the vaccine is available to you, GET IT.  If you listen to any of this anti-vaxxer bullshit thats tossed around you are a complete idiot.  As someone who has worked on vaccines, studied vaccines, knows immunology, and whose very life DEPENDS ON FRACKING VACCINES, they work extremely well, they are cheap, and they are devoid of any serious side effects the vast extreme majority of the time. 

 

/rant off.

Being able to pay lab techs chump wages, work them into the ground and no pollution regulations is a bigger incentive for outsourcing.

 

The only reason I have stopped with yearly vaccines is that my immune system seemed to become dependent on them.  I had to take the vaccine in the military and I did it for the first two years of undergrad school. I stopped one year and was floored for about a week.  Since then, I get a mildly unpleasant bug but I can still get around and don't feel like I was hit by a car.