November 3, 2009
Tomgram: Barbara Ehrenreich, Why Your Child May Not Get a Swine Flu Shot
Soon
Tom Englehardt's intro:
This week, the Obama White House released a very partial record of those who
had visited since January 20, 2009. This it hailed as "transparency like
you've never seen it before" and as the beginning of a new White House
visitor transparency policy. Unfortunately, the policy applies mainly to
post-September 15th visitors and has a caveat that, in time, could prove
large enough to drive a Humvee through. As the White House website puts it,
all names of visitors will be released after a lag of 90-120 days, "aside
from a small group of appointments that cannot be disclosed because of
national security imperatives or their necessarily confidential nature (such
as a visit by a possible Supreme Court nominee)."
The version of the story that hit TV screens and most newspapers had to do
with William Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, Michael Moore, and Michael Jordan, who
were on the list, but weren't actually William Ayers, Jeremiah Wright,
Michael Moore, and Michael Jordan. Not the ones who come to your mind,
anyway.
The secondary story was that Oprah Winfrey, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and
Bill Gates were exactly the Oprah Winfrey, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and
Bill Gates you'd imagine, and that in the last eight months a reasonable
amount of star power had indeed passed through those well-guarded gates.
Then there was labor leader Andrew Stern, fingered by the Wall Street
Journal for his 22 visits.
And, oh yes, there were the others, too, even if they didn't really cause
much of a stir. On this already limited list of visitors, for instance, Wall
Street was hardly missing-in-action, nor was big oil. Visiting "the people's
house" were Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, who met a mere two times
with the President and once with economic advisor Lawrence Summers; James
Dimon, chief executive of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., who made it in but six
times, as well as Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit; Rex Tillerson, chairman and
chief executive of ExxonMobil Corp; David O'Reilly, CEO of Chevron; Maurice
Greenberg, former head of AIG; and so on, including a striking crew of
lobbyists. In other words, no big deal.
Now, me, I wouldn't mind knowing whether on the unreleased visitors' lists
for these last months lurked Andrew Witty, CEO of GlaxoSmithKline, or
Novartis CEO Daniel Vasella (or their lobbyists), not to speak of other Big
Pharma types. Did they make it to the White House, and if so, how many
times? I'm curious because Barbara Ehrenreich identifies their companies as
the ones screwing up the production of the swine flu vaccine, and somehow
they did manage to get a modest infusion of $2 billion from the Obama
administration to do a less than magnificent job of this. I wonder just what
deals might have been broached with them in the people's name.
In the spirit of Ehrenreich's remarkable new book, Bright-Sided: How the
Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America -- which
I've recommended before -- I'd like to exhibit a little positive thinking
and hope that some enterprising reporter digs up this info for the rest of
us, and soon. In the meantime, do check out Ehrenreich's book (as well as
the audio interview she did for TomDispatch to go with today's piece). It
admittedly won't make you more optimistic, or even healthier, just a lot
wiser and far more irritated. -Tom (Click on the URL for connections)
- - -
The Swine Flu Vaccine Screw-up
Optimism as a Public Health Problem
"If, in fact, there's a political parable here, it's about Big Government's
sweetly trusting reliance on Big Business to safeguard the public health:"
By Barbara Ehrenreich
TomGram: November 03, 2009
If you can't find any swine flu vaccine for your kids, it won't be for a
lack of positive thinking. In fact, the whole flu snafu is being blamed on
"undue optimism" on the part of both the Obama administration and Big
Pharma.
Optimism is supposed to be good for our health. According to the academic
"positive psychologists," as well as legions of unlicensed life coaches and
inspirational speakers, optimism wards off common illnesses, contributes to
recovery from cancer, and extends longevity. To its promoters, optimism is
practically a miracle vaccine, so essential that we need to start
inoculating Americans with it in the public schools -- in the form of
"optimism training."
But optimism turns out to be less than salubrious when it comes to public
health. In July, the federal government promised to have 160 million doses
of H1N1 vaccine ready for distribution by the end of October. Instead, only
28 million doses are now ready to go, and optimism is the obvious culprit.
"Road to Flu Vaccine Shortfall, Paved With Undue Optimism," was the headline
of a front page article in the October 26th New York Times. In the
conventional spin, the vaccine shortage is now "threatening to undermine
public confidence in government." If the federal government couldn't get
this right, the pundits are already asking, how can we trust it with health
reform?
But let's stop a minute and also ask: Who really screwed up here -- the
government or private pharmaceutical companies, including GlaxoSmithKline,
Novartis, and three others that had agreed to manufacture and deliver the
vaccine by late fall? Last spring and summer, those companies gleefully
gobbled up $2 billion worth of government contracts for vaccine production,
promising to have every American, or at least every American child and
pregnant woman, supplied with vaccine before trick-or-treating season began.
According to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the
government was misled by these companies, which failed to report
manufacturing delays as they arose. Her department, she says, was "relying
on the manufacturers to give us their numbers, and as soon as we got numbers
we put them out to the public. It does appear now that those numbers were
overly rosy."
If, in fact, there's a political parable here, it's about Big Government's
sweetly trusting reliance on Big Business to safeguard the public health:
Let the private insurance companies manage health financing; let
profit-making hospital chains deliver health care; let Big Pharma provide
safe and affordable medications. As it happens, though, all these entities
have a priority that regularly overrides the public's health, and that is,
of course, profit -- which has led insurance companies to function as "death
panels," excluding those who might ever need care, and for-profit hospitals
to turn away the indigent, the pregnant, and the uninsured.
As for Big Pharma, the truth is that they're just not all that into
vaccines, traditionally preferring to manufacture drugs for such plagues as
erectile dysfunction, social anxiety, and restless leg syndrome. Vaccines
can be tricky and less than maximally profitable to manufacture. They go out
of style with every microbial mutation, and usually it's the government,
rather than cunning direct-to-consumer commercials, that determines who gets
them. So it should have been no surprise that Big Pharma approached the H1N1
problem ploddingly, using a 50-year old technology involving the production
of the virus in chicken eggs, a method long since abandoned by China and the
European Union.
Chicken eggs are fine for omelets, but they have quickly proved to be a poor
growth medium for the viral "seed" strain used to make H1N1 vaccine. There
are alternative "cell culture" methods that could produce the vaccine much
faster, but in complete defiance of the conventional wisdom that private
enterprise is always more innovative and resourceful than government, Big
Pharma did not demand that they be made available for this year's swine flu
epidemic. Just for the record, those alternative methods have been developed
with government funding, which is also the source of almost all our basic
knowledge of viruses.
So, thanks to the drug companies, optimism has been about as effective in
warding off H1N1 as amulets or fairy dust. Both the government and Big
Pharma were indeed overly optimistic about the latter's ability to supply
the vaccine, leaving those of us who are involved in the care of small
children with little to rely on but hope -- hope that the epidemic will fade
out on its own, hope that our loved ones have the luck to survive it.
And contrary to the claims of the positive psychologists, optimism itself is
neither an elixir, nor a life-saving vaccine. Recent studies show that
optimism -- or positive feelings -- do not affect recovery from a variety of
cancers, including those of the breast, lungs, neck, and throat.
Furthermore, the evidence that optimism prolongs life has turned out to be
shaky at best: one study of nuns frequently cited as proof positive of
optimism's healthful effects turned out, in fact, only to show that nuns who
wrote more eloquently about their vows in their early twenties tended to
outlive those whose written statements were clunkier.
Are we ready to abandon faith-based medicine of both the individual and
public health variety? Faith in private enterprise and the market has now
left us open to a swine flu epidemic; faith alone -- in the form of optimism
or hope -- does not kill viruses or cancer cells. On the public health
front, we need to socialize vaccine manufacture as well as its distribution.
Then, if the supply falls short, we can always impeach the president. On the
individual front, there's always soap and water.
Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of 16 books, including the bestsellers
Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch. A frequent contributor to Harper's and
the Nation, she has also been a columnist at the New York Times and Time
magazine. Her seventeenth book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion
of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (Metropolitan Books), has just
been published. An examination of recent studies of the medical
ineffectiveness of positive thinking, mentioned in this essay, can be found
in the book. To listen to the TomDispatch audio interview with Ehrenreich
that accompanies this piece, click on the URL
Copyright 2009 Barbara Ehrenreich
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