Avian Flu Alarm
By Callimachus | Related entries in Breaking News, Health CareAustin Bay, who has some background in bio-defense and has followed the literature on it, posts the transcript of today’s interview with Dr Rajeev Venyayya, special assistant to the President for biological defense policy, verbatim, with some highlights picked out. It’s a good intro to a suddenly hot topic for those of us who haven’t boned up.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 1st, 2005 and is filed under Breaking News, Health Care. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
November 2nd, 2005 at 6:21 pm
It’s really only a hot topic at the moment because Bush needed another hot-button issue with buzzwords like “pandemic” that take headlines away from other buzzwords like “Indicted,” “Deception,” “Torture,” and “Corruption”
The avian flu is out there, and real, but the likelihood of it moving to human populations with the current h5n1 configuration (i.e. anything that would be protected against by current vaccines) is unknown. So basically we’re spending billions on something that only has a chance of working against something that only has a chance of occurring.
A more pragmatic response would be to invest that money into research on analogues to Tamiflu and other such antivirals that are generically useful as opposed to single-target like the current vaccines. Or perhaps creating better methods of synthesizing large quantities of vaccine quickly once a virus strain has been identified. But that doesn’t have the same news flair or give as much of a sense of false security as “10 million vaccines purchased.”
7 billion dollars is a lot to spend on spin.