BY: Michael J. Panzner Posted: 01 Jun 2010 06:14 PM PDT
(Image: Source)
Rebound in the labor market? Looks more like a dead cat bounce, where a great many of the jobs being created are either temporary, part-time, low wage, or stripped down, like those detailed in the following CNNMoney.com report, “Say Goodbye to Full-Time Jobs with Benefits”:
![The H5N1 Virus [snag]](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/25/61309174_35c7397efc_m.jpg "The H5N1 Virus [snag]")
By EBEN HARRELL
By the summer of 2009, shortly after the H1N1 flu pandemic had first emerged, there was a waiting list for the first several million doses of the forthcoming new flu vaccine. At the head of the line, naturally, were the world’s richest nations. “Again we see the advantage of affluence,” said Margaret Chan, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO), at a news conference on July 14. “Again we see access denied by an inability to pay.” Describing H1N1 as “entirely new and highly contagious,” Chan scolded rich countries at the time for hoarding the “lion’s share” of the global H1N1-vaccine supply.(Comment on this story below.)
Six months later, Chan’s admonitions seem prescient. Rich countries’ hoards have become massive surpluses, and many nations are now trying frantically to cancel pending orders of vaccines or transfer them to poorer nations. France, which had ordered enough of the vaccine to inoculate its entire population of 60 million, has so far used only 5 million doses and now wants to cancel 50 million doses and sell millions more. Similarly, the Netherlands has a 19 million–dose order for sale to other countries, while Germany is in talks with drug manufacturers to halve its order of 50 million doses and sell off millions of others. Switzerland, Spain and Britain are also considering giving away or selling the millions of doses of the vaccine they have received or have on order. The U.S., which has so far distributed 160 million of the 251 million doses it purchased to doctors, hospitals and other health care providers across the country, has yet to make a decision on whether it will have an overflow and what it will do with any surplus.(Watch TIME’s video “Chicken Eggs and Antigens: How the H1N1 Vaccine Is Made.”)
Monica Davey
The swine flu vaccine has become a coveted commodity all over the country, but someone in Milwaukee appeared at first glance to carry the notion to a new level this week, stealing off in a refrigerated truck that was hauling 930 of the prized doses.
The doses were being returned to Milwaukee’s main storage facility on Thursday evening after a public vaccination clinic when one or more people took off in the truck, which had been left idling and unattended only for moments, the authorities said.
The police found the truck 40 minutes later, and said the crime appeared to have been inspired more by the easily available vehicle than by the H1N1 vaccine inside. In fact, the vaccine was all found, apparently untouched and perhaps even unnoticed.
The doses will now be sent back to their manufacturers, although Milwaukee, like seemingly every other city, has plenty of people hoping to get one. “Given that it was out of our chain of custody, we cannot validate the integrity of that vaccine,” said Bevan K. Baker, the city health commissioner.
As prosecutors considered charges against a man suspected in the theft, there was other fallout: the department will no longer employ the transport company involved, Mr. Baker said, and trucks bearing H1N1 doses will now be escorted by a police squad car.
“We’re prepared to give this precious cargo its appropriate resting place” – in arms and noses, he said
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/07/us/07truck.html?_r=3&hpw
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President Obama and his top health officials are engaging in a major public relations effort to divert attention away from whether its swine flu vaccine is effective and safe – to whether there is enough of it to go around. And the media, as always, is cooperating fully. This echoes the way media debate was manipulated during the Vietnam and Iraq Wars. Instead of debating whether we should even be fighting those wars, the media debated only whether we were using the correct military strategy.
Increasing numbers of scientists and doctors are issuing harsh criticisms of the Government’s plan to vaccinate (forcibly if necessary) virtually the entire U.S. population with what they claim is a poorly tested vaccine that is not only ineffective against swine flu, but could cripple and even kill many more people than it helps.
The CDC’s public relations campaign has been running “scare” ads that portray swine flu as a full-blown “pandemic” responsible for snuffing out countless lives, and which, unless stopped by universal vaccination, could kill millions of American citizens. But scientists and health officials throughout the world have called the governments claims unjustified and deliberately misleading.
For example, Dr. Anthony Morris, a distinguished virologist and former Chief Vaccine Office at the U.S. Federal Drug Administration (FDA), states that “There is no evidence that any influenza vaccine thus far developed is effective in preventing or mitigating any attack of influenza” and that “The producers of these vaccines know they are worthless, but they go on selling them anyway.”
And in November 2007, the UK newspaper The Scotsman, made public warnings by the inventor of the “flu jab,” Dr. Graeme Laver. Dr. Laver was a major Australian scientist involved in the invention of a flu vaccine, in addition to playing a leading scientific role in the discovery of anti-flu drugs. He went on record as saying the vaccine he helped to create was ineffective and [that] natural infection with the flu was safer. “I have never been impressed with its efficacy,” said Dr. Laver.
“Over the course of the next few months, with the assistance of our partners in the private and public sector and at every level of government, we will move aggressively to prepare the nation for the possibility of a more severe outbreak of the H1N1 virus. We will do all we can to plan for different scenarios. We ask the American people to become actively engaged with their own preparation and prevention. It’s a responsibility we all share.” (US Government advisory, flu.gov: Vaccines, Vaccine Allocation and Vaccine Research )
A Worldwide public health emergency is unfolding on an unprecedented scale. 4.9 billion doses of H1N1 swine flu vaccine are envisaged by the World Health Organization (WHO).
A report by President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology “considers the H1N1 pandemic ‘a serious health threat; to the U.S. — not as serious as the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic but worse than the swine flu outbreak of 1976.”:
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