Political Virus (WSJ Editorial)

WSJ ^

[indianrightwinger]

Political Virus October 22, 2005; Page A6

Our political leaders keep telling us to fear the avian flu, and in one sense they're right: We should all be scared to death about how much damage our political leaders will do responding to the avian flu.

Consider Secretary General Kofi Annan, who declared this month that he hoped concern for "intellectual property" wouldn't "get into the way" of procuring widespread vaccines for a potential avian-flu outbreak. In other words, companies that make vaccines should abandon their patents at Mr. Annan's whim. This kind of hostility to property rights is precisely the reason we now have a shortage of vaccines and drugs to combat this potential pandemic.

No one really knows how great the avian flu threat is. Public-health officials have been warning about it ever since new studies suggested that the infamous 1918 flu outbreak originated in birds. Warning is what these folks get paid to do. Other experts argue that 1918 was a fluke and that the current avian virus is unlikely to become a mass killer of humans.

Whatever the risk, some good will come out of this public alarm if we use it as an opportunity to understand why the U.S. is now so poorly armed to cope with a deadly flu outbreak. The reason is that our political class has spent the past 30 years driving the vaccine industry out of business with its own virus of over-regulation, price controls, litigation and intellectual-property abuse.

[indianrightwinger]

Ried sponsored and won a $3B spending measure in the Senate.

[I8NY]

Fund is right that we have to keep an eye on this. OTOH, there's no way that Roche could produce even enough Tamiflu for the US market with its current facilities if an outbreak occurred. SOunds like Lindsay Graham did the right thing on this one, and so did Roche.

[okie01]

In their first venture into socialized medicine, the Clintons destroyed the vaccine business in the U.S.

In one fell swoop, vaccines became a "single-source" industry selling to a "single payer" -- the federal government.

In turn, the single customer set the price and restricted the quantitities they would buy. The result was to drive most suppliers out of the business...and overseas.

Now, the vaccines available are the cheapest available, to be sure -- but there is never enough, nor are they the proper (or even the best) varieties.

A case study in what National Health Care would become...

[indianrightwinger]

But, bashing pharmas always works.

Shame. Even a major health disaster won't make people realize the idiocy of the policies. They will blame the vaccine makers even more.