We are now in an officially declared national emergency.
Obama Declares Swine-Flu Emergency
By BETSY MCKAY and CAM SIMPSON : The Wall Street Journal [Excerpted]
WASHINGTON–President Barack Obama declared the swine-flu outbreak a national emergency, easing the way for doctors and health-care facilities to respond more quickly to the growing number of sick people, the White House said Saturday.
The declaration, which Mr. Obama signed Friday, authorizes the administration to waive or modify certain federal requirements involving Medicare, Medicaid, and health privacy rules to speed treatment.
“The rates of illness continue to rise rapidly within many communities across the nation, and the potential exists for the pandemic to overburden health care resources in some localities,” Mr. Obama wrote in the declaration.
There is no national emergency currently but the stage is set such that we could easily tip into one in the very near future.
Much of what we have in the way of pandemic mitigation efforts and strategies is because of work begun in 2005. Every little bit of the woefully inadequate capability to mitigate a pandemic was accomplished only after much tugging – pushing – prodding – along with wrestling egos and “political fiefdoms”.
Had we as a nation done more ahead of the pandemic, a pandemic we knew we could logically expect “at some point in the future”, we would not now have to even be considering a “national emergency” for such a mild pandemic.
Still, even this mild pandemic has claimed the lives of over 1,000 people in the US, 96 of them [nearly 10%] young people and children under the age of eighteen.
We do not have enough vaccine for the entire population of the US. Thus far, we’ve barely topped the 10% mark…
A total of 11.3 million doses of vaccine had been shipped to U.S. doctors, hospitals, and clinics as of Wednesday, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, out of a total of 14.1 million doses that manufacturers had shipped to warehouses by that time.
By Friday, 16.1 million doses of vaccine had been shipped to warehouses, the CDC said.
The total is far below the government’s most recent estimate that, by the end of this month, about 28 million to 30 million doses would be shipped to warehouses for further distribution. That estimate itself is a revison, made last week, from a prior expectation of about 40 million doses by the end of the month. In July, the government had predicted that 120 million doses would be ready in October.
It’s no doubt a good thing so many in the US do not want the pandemic vaccine. Imagine the chaos and anger if demand was even slightly higher than it is. Imagine the chaos and anger if the pandemic was “moderate” instead of “mild”.
I have spent the last several months “prosthelytizing” on my “other blog” the efficacy and prudence of getting the pandemic vaccine. I have decided to cease my efforts on that front. Why advocate for something no one can obtain?
We botched this… badly. However, without the efforts we expended “against the day” of that future pandemic, you know, the one we find ourselves in the midst of, it would have been a lot worse. I could be writing about no one having the protection of a vaccine against the pandemic H1N1.
But because we botched this we are left with our national emergency. Ten percent of a population protected is not enough. It’s not enough even if you toss in the ten percent already infected and recovered. It’s not enough if you increased the percentage of infected-recovered to twenty percent. Generously assuming thirty percent combined: that leaves seventy percent still at some risk.
If one considers that we still do not know what the traditional seasonal flu will do when – if it presents itself – we may be facing a very stressful next few months. Stress that will translate to lives lost. How many is lives is just one of the many open questions we are facing. The very same open questions that inspired our president to declare a national emergency.
