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.