Federal Bird Flu Plan “Let Locals Do It”

In the biggest abdication of responsibility since Edward told the British Empire he’d rather than Mrs. Simpson than a crown, the US government has decided that it won’t even try to deal with any possible bird flu pandemic. Authors of a 227-page report detailing the policy wrote, “The impact of a severe pandemic may be more comparable to that of war or a widespread economic crisis than a hurricane, earthquake, or act of terrorism.” Since when would counties and small towns be able to cope with this?

The report, “Implementation Plan of the National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza”, doesn’t actually address bird flu directly, nor should it. Whether the H5N1 virus mutates into a bug that can be transmitted directly from human to human or not is irrelevant to a national response to whatever bug out there eventually turns into a pandemic. Biologists are pretty certain that it is a matter of when and not if. Some plan, therefore, is necessary. The report, though, is a non-plan.

Among the many unfunded mandates the plan forces upon the state and local governments is “ensuring that all reasonable measures are taken to limit the spread of an outbreak within and beyond the community’s borders.” Any such measures will fall short in a federal system where people are allowed to own cars. Just how is Minneapolis to prevent people from entering and leaving St. Paul, a separate legal entity but part of the same urban realm? Only a higher, that is federal, authority can be effective here.

In order to prepare for the viral onslaught, the report calls for $7.1 billion, 95% to be spent on stockpiling Tamilflu and figuring out how to more rapidly develop vaccines. However, Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health told Newsweek that the nation has about 105,000 mechanical ventilators, while a pandemic would require 700,000 to 800,000 of them. The plan has no provision for increasing the number, which means that getting to the hospital may not help much.

Moreover, there are 43 million people without insurance. Presuming 30-35% of the population gets infected (which is what most experts say parallels the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-19) that means about 12-14 million are going to get very sick and won’t be able to pay for it. This bankrupts what is already a wobbly healthcare system and will leave many more corpses than would otherwise be the case. The White House says 2 million is a plausible figure but one might suggest that half could be avoided were there a credible plan in place beforehand.

The trouble with electing a party to office that doesn’t believe in government spending is its absolute inability to believe that some solutions require government investment. There is a significant difference in the nouns, but that has clearly been lost on an administration that doesn’t do its homework. If one needs evidence that local government can't do this job, visit New Orleans.

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

Home