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The $443 Million Smallpox Vaccine That Nobody Needs
Hugh Pickens writes "Once feared for its grotesque pustules and 30% death rate, smallpox was eradicated worldwide as of 1978 and is known to exist only in the locked freezers of a Russian scientific institute and the US government. There is no credible evidence that any other country or a terrorist group possesses smallpox, but if there were an attack, the government could draw on $1 billion worth of smallpox vaccine it already owns to inoculate the entire US population and quickly treat people exposed to the virus. The vaccine, which costs the government $3 per dose, can reliably prevent death when given within four days of exposure. David Williams writes that over the last year, the Obama administration has aggressively pushed a $433-million plan to buy an experimental smallpox drug, despite uncertainty over whether it is needed or will work. So why did the government award a "sole-source" procurement to Siga Technologies Inc., whose controlling shareholder is billionaire Ronald O. Perelman, calling for Siga to deliver 1.7 million doses of the drug for the nation's biodefense stockpile at a price of approximately $255 per dose. 'We've got a vaccine that I hope we never have to use — how much more do we need?' says epidemiologist Dr. Donald A. Henderson who led the global eradication of smallpox for the WHO. 'The bottom line is, we've got a limited amount of money.'"
Person 1 wants money, and person 2 wants to give it to them. Person 2 has lots of money to spend that he's trusted with by other people, so he can't just give the money to person 1, so he comes up with a way to include it as part of a bigger deal that looks like business.
Sounds like the textbook definition of corruption I learned in macro econ in highschool. This clumsy scheme is just above obvious, too. I guess it works so well with Chertoff and Rapiscan, hell, why even try to hide it anymore?
Wallstreet should get a clue - they don't need to create 5 layers of finiancial instruments to hide corruption anymore - this is 2011. The govt does whatever the hell it wants, and if you don't like it the media will paint you to be an unwashed mass who needs "to get a job".
Sorry, I started to vent a little there.
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int 21h
Why not?
If it were a Republican president this would be considered fair posting for Slashdot.
(Gimme those troll points.) :-{=
"Siga's drug, an antiviral pill called ST-246, would be used to treat people who were diagnosed with smallpox too late for the vaccine to help. Yet the new drug cannot be tested for effectiveness in people because of ethical constraints — and no one knows whether animal testing could prove it would work in humans."
The disease has a lot of characteristics that make it a good weaponized agent. In fact, this has been one of the most studied diseases in that regard. To my knowledge, there is no known treatment/cure for smallpox- you either get vaccinated before symptoms show, or you suffer through it and possibly die. Its means of infection are well known, and I would hazard a guess that someone in the US DoD would find a smallpox *treatment/cure* that works after an infection has taken hold something worth studying for other purposes. It would also seem to me that the military is hedging its bets my making sure other nations don't get this technology as well.
...when Democrats do it. Never mind a certain $3T war with lots of tasty no-bid contracts to the Vice President's company...
Please see this video. Long story short, $443 million isn't a lot of money in the grand scheme of things. Now, $70 billion in tax cuts for the rich? Well, we're starting to talk some real money. The cost of the Iraq war? Yeah, about that...
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This isn't an article about a second vaccine. It is about a drug that we don't know will work, that costs a lot, and will expire before it is ever used.
The fact that people call out the Obama administration on things they do wrong without cries of "OMG HE'S HALF NIGGER, THE WURST KIND OF NIGUR" directed at the man heading the administration, to me, indicates the human race may be getting somewhere (slowly).
--os
You're just being partisan.
Real trolling would be pointing out that the whole premise of universal healthcare is that the collective wisdom of the government can make better decisions about how to spend money on health than individuals can. Yet here we have the same government blowing a billion dollars on a vaccine for a disease that doesn't exist any more. Meanwhile, people are suffering and dying because the FDA is holding up lifesaving experimental medicine.
For Air Conditioning for one week in Afghanistan.
Obama is corrupt, but you would still vote for him instead of Ron Paul who wants to cut taxes, get rid of income tax, cut departments that don't serve a purpose, and cut overseas military spending?
Because the current smallpox vaccine can kill. Not many, sure, but if you try to apply it to an entire population? Some people are going to die.
You should really read more about what's going on, as that's a very poor description of what's happening in Europe. Hint: Europe != EU != Eurozone, and there are lots of different economies in the EU, some are doing rather well indeed.
Ah, I guess you've never met Peter King. Or Herman Cain. Sarah Palin. Or even Frank Miller.
Heck maybe you've never seen Mitt Romney's outright distortion of a comment President Obama made about "We've been Lazy" ? Or perhaps you believe that calling somebody a Nazi is only done by the Left...never used by anybody on Fox News.
Yeah, keep pushing the "Conservatives are innocent of any outbursts, and are always polite and decorous" you'll get far with that. Maybe all the way to a slot on Fox News or MSNBC.
Until you're ridiculed for your own hypocrisy on the Daily Show!
Just hope there's not video.
Oh wait, there is!
My problem with Paul is he has made it clear that as a Libertarian his goal is true laissez faire capitalism and as we have seen time and time again that is a recipe for disaster.
For a good example of that just look at China which despite all their talk of communism is more laissez faire than anyone else. Sure their economy is rolling while more than 10% of their farmlands are poisoned and a person living in their cities sucks down more toxins in a week than an American does in 5 years. Take a look at the top 10 cancer causing cities in the world and 9 out of 10 are in China, the only other one being an abandoned Soviet era chemical factory town.
If anything I'd say we need a more socialist system, and no what we have now is only "socialism for the rich" as in TARP and too big to fail. there is NO reason why every American shouldn't have clothes on their backs, food in their belly, a roof over their heads, and medicine when they are sick, NONE. If they want more than that? Work. But of course for them to have work you'd have to get rid of this "free market" horseshit, which is just what it is as India and China don't follow our regs or play by the rules, China going so far as manipulating their currency to make sure our imports are too high while their exports are cheap.
No I'm sorry but laissez faire capitalism just doesn't work, in fact I'd argue that capitalism as a system has nearly reached the end of its course, why? simple as tech progresses we are seeing the need for fewer and fewer workers and I truly believe we are at the point when many being born today simply won't be able to trade their labor for capital (the entire basis for capitalism) because their labor simply won't be needed.
We are in an IQ musical chairs and more and more simply can't find a seat. They are already working on robot fruit pickers and field hands, machines that can crank out a home from prefabbed pieces, what do you do with all these people? Do you execute them? Create "make work" as we have done with the fast food industry? BTW did you know that Walmart shows as one of their training films how to get on food stamps? How much you wanna bet that without that "government assistance" making labor cheaper than it should be that Walmart would just replace them with automated stockers?
The technology already exists to replace most of your low end workers, and those that work with their muscles and not their brains. The average IQ is 103, these people simply can't be trained to be rocket scientists and frankly we wouldn't need that many rocket scientists anyway! What do you do? send them to a camp? Take away their rights to have families? The only answer I can see is going towards a more socialist system where someone can live without having worked a day in their life, because otherwise we have to become Luddites and smash the machines or we are gonna have to seriously thin the herd.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Add to this that Greece going under is mainly due to there being a culture of not paying taxes & the huge cash-in-hand economy.
Isn't that what these Libertarian/Republicans in the US want? Small government, low taxes, etc?
Greece is a chilling vision of things to come for the US if this neoconservative ideology is continued to be pushed.
The US Military hasn't been willing to let go of biological warfare, and probably also hasn't been willing to let go of chemical warfare either. And the Ex-Soviet Cold Warriors haven't been willing to either, and neither side trusts the other, and they aren't going to let little events like the fall of the Soviet Empire calm them down. If you remember the late years of the Clinton Administration, the fearmonger types were busy ranting about Anthrax and Terrorism, so after 9/11 happened, it was US biowarfare weaponized anthrax they kept working on got used for terrorism, and Bush got to lie about Saddam making anthrax and force US soldiers to get relatively risky vaccines to keep his pharma and biowarfare friends happy. Bush and Cheney also tried to ramp up anti-Russian fear and push NATO to be aggressive toward them (and after all, fighting Russians is NATO's whole purpose, so if they didn't do it they'd be obsolete), and that helped Russia pick Putin as a tough-guy leader, who's happy to have a quasi-enemy to give him an excuse to get tougher, and both sides get to use terrorism as an excuse to pretend that they need to keep developing biowarfare capabilities in case terrorists or crazy employees steal the other side's smallpox*, while quietly telling their own political hardliners that they don't trust the other side's military hardliners.
It's especially egregious with smallpox, because you can make anti-smallpox vaccines the old-fashioned way, from cowpox, and don't have to keep smallpox itself around. There's no excuse for either side not to eradicate their stash, and by doing so, they can reduce the risk to themselves as well as the rest of the world, even if the other side cheats . But even with anthrax, there's no excuse for the US to be developing techniques to weaponize it, as opposed to just keeping it around for vaccine and antibiotic testing, and while Cipro's now out of patent, countries like Argentina which have occasional anthrax problems (from cattle ranching) generally just use penicillins.
( * And it turns out not to matter whether the FBI is right that Bruce Ivins was guilty, or the crazy conspiracy theorists who say Ivins was framed as a coverup by the spooks who really did it are right, or the FBI-is-incompetent theorists who say that Ivins was believable enough to get people off the FBI's case after they were wrong about Hatfill, because either way there can be another Bruce Ivins or Ivan Brewski around to flip out or frame. Only way to prevent it is to destroy it all.)
Bill Stewart
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