Medicine is MONEY.
Just TRY to keep gummint away from THAT.
Magus wrote:Medicine is MONEY.
Just TRY to keep gummint away from THAT.
Business equals money and no one is in business to lose money. If we are to have the medicine we need then allow the companies that make the medicine to make their money. To place govt restrictions on profit is not allowing business to operate in a free market society.
Magus wrote:"...the REAL reason..."?
Lash you confuse your "humble opinion" with "Gospel Truth".
You're not the first to do so... there are reasons why the "one, Holy, catholic and Apostolic Church" is fractured into so many pieces and sects
...primary among which is Human Nature: a surfeit of arrogance and a deficit of humility.
I was responding to someone else's stated REAL reason, in a previous post. Did they also confuse their "humble opinion with the "Gospel Truth"?
Flu-shot mess exposes faulty system
BY ALISON GENDAR
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Long lines, short tempers and price gouging exposed what health experts have known for years: The United States' system for buying and distributing lifesaving vaccines is itself on life support.
"It's an antiquated system," said Dr. Martin Blaser, head of medicine at New York University and new president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
"We should be the leading nation in the world, and the past few weeks have proved to everyone that we are not," he said.
Flu is in the spotlight now, but in the past four years the U.S. has run low on vaccines for diphtheria, tetanus, measles, mumps and rubella.
The problem is few companies want to run the financial and legal risks to make vaccines, health experts said. So it will take government intervention to guarantee a secure supply of vaccines.
"Rational businessmen don't keep doing stuff if they don't make money," said Mark Steinhoff, a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
America has only two licensed sources for flu vaccine, three for meningitis and just one for such dangers as polio, measles, diphtheria and anthrax.
And for scourges like smallpox, the U.S. has no licensed manufacturers, despite fears of terrorism.
"It was strange to discover that a great nation like the U.S. has so few suppliers," said John Oxford, an expert on influenza at Queen Mary's College in London.
Vaccines are tricky to make. A single misstep means the batch has to be tossed, as happened with Chiron Corp., one of this country's two flu vaccine suppliers.
Since there is a new strain of flu each year, vaccines are good for one season. Manufacturers guess in the spring which strain will hit in the winter and how many doses will be needed. It's expensive to guess wrong.
MedImmune, makers of nasal FluMist, had to toss 4 million doses last year when the public failed to see the nasal spray as a viable alternative to a shot in the arm.
Rather than run big vaccine losses, manufacturers turned to high-end drugs.
"Why spend money to make a $7 to $10 dose for a once-a-year flu vaccine, when you could make [cholesterol-lowering] Lipitor where patients pay $2 a pill every day for the rest of their lives?" said Frank Sloan, an economist at Duke University who led an Institute of Medicine study of the vaccine problem in 2002.
Health care advocates said the U.S. could break the logjam by agreeing to buy a set number of flu doses each year. Britain and Canada already use this technique to reduce the risk to their suppliers.
"I'm not one in favor of letting big government do everything, but I think flu vaccine is one of those things government should step in on," Steinhoff said.
That guarantee, plus the ability to import freely from other European countries, meant Britain had five other suppliers to chose from when Chiron ran into trouble.
Both presidential candidates have talked about the need for reform. That, coupled with chronic shortages, prompted two new flu suppliers, giant GlaxoSmithKline and the small Canadian company ID Biomedical, to announce that they will be taking a shot at the $300-million-a-year flu vaccine business.
from what i understand, the u.s. government controls the 'strategic petroleum reserve'. should the control over medications/vaccines used by the citizens of the country not also be under some kind of government control ? surely there is no greater vulnerability than for a country to gamble with the health of its citizens. terrorists might be able to take advantage of weaknesses in the control over drugs/vaccines to do untold harm to a nation - particularly when much of the drugs/vaccines are produced overseas. there seems to be a HUGE gap in the defence of the united states. hbg
