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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.'"
ron pearlman was cool guy
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.
mov ah, 4ch
int 21h
Obviously this is proof that time travel has been discovered by the military and there is a fear that someone will bring back small pox.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Stop posting all these anti Obama articles.....they are not supposed to be covered. You need to call the New York TImes to get your daily meme that they are pushing. You have lost the narrative when you start letting people know whats really going on. thanks...thats all for now.
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.
While this does sound like shady dealing, there are legitimate reasons to build a stockpile of an alternate vaccine. The current one is not without its risks and side effects that significantly limit the population to whom it can be safely administered. In particular, they've had to stop immunizing first responders because of the risk. When the WHO was using ring vaccination to eradicate the disease, they accepted that a on the order of 1 in 1,000 would die from the vaccine. Obviously that's something we would like to avoid if possible.
The government puts the vaccine to use regularly. The fill up airplanes with it and the resulting chemtrails are what give people autism.
WAKE UP, PEOPLE.
It's true! I read this comment but didn't post it. Three days later, I graduated from Penn State!
...when Democrats do it. Never mind a certain $3T war with lots of tasty no-bid contracts to the Vice President's company...
Because the Obama administration is the most corrupt presidency in modern history.
It's like he took "Can't be worse than Bush" as a challenge.
Before you all get upset about this, consider that there's probably more to the story. The source is Commentary Magazine, whose headlines right now are:
"National Cost of “Occupation” to Top $12 Million"
"Toomey Offers Democrats a Way Out of Supercommittee Standoff"
"Warren Backs Away From OWS"
"Police Reportedly Slashed, Attacked With Liquid at OWS"
Etc. I don't know anything about this story myself, but I know enough by this point not to just believe people when they say something bad happened at the hands of "the Obama administration."
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.
Because Siga is the only company offering such a drug. It's hard not to sole source something when there's only a sole source.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
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.
Your mentioning of the death rate for the ring vaccination reminded me of variolation, the earliest known deliberate vaccination method for smallpox.
Variolation had a death rate of 1-2%. But 'wild caught' smallpox had a death rate of around 30%, so even royalty variolated their kids as the safest alternative.
We're absolutely spoiled in modern society when it comes to disease. It used to be the #1 killer. Disease used to kill more soldiers in campaigns than the fighting did.
I don't read AC A human right
For Air Conditioning for one week in Afghanistan.
The whole description is being partisan, and ignorant, and incomplete.
A) The government hasn't approved this.
B) The VA system is government run and it's one of the best healthcare systems in the world.
C) Pretty much every universal healthcare is better the what we have now.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Why not just bring back the smallpox vaccine as a standard vaccination for children, and recommend booster shots for adults every decade or so? The military and their families got them regularly back when I was a boy, and I still have the scars to prove it. Not that I'd be keen to rely on a decades-old vaccination if push came to shove. We could just have a "You guys are getting a free (And Mandatory) flu and smallpox shot this year" day and then we wouldn't have to worry about that so much.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Here are my comments that I attached to this post while it was in slashdot/recent. I guess the editors didn't take much heed.
RTFA
Ok, I know that the LA times is not what I would call the paragon of great journalism but still you should closely RTFA. (Compare the writing in this, where the writer just seems to go on and on reciting facts without concise summarization and a coherent narrative to that of a well written NYTimes piece).
First the fact that these guys "are long time political donors" and "65% of their donations went to the Democratic party in 2008 and 2010" do not automatically make them "longtime Democratic donors". I'm not saying they aren't but don't jump to conclusions (Isn't it possible that these guys, seeing the way the political winds were shifting sent more of their money to the Democrats those years? Also if they gave only 65% to anyone that implies they weren't hardcore supporters, they didn't give 100% did they?).
Second; according to TFA most of the company's actions took place under the Bush administration. The company was formed after Bush made anti-bio weapons preparedness a priority and the Bush administration were the ones who gave the company its grants (did they receive even a dime under the Obama administration?).
Third; again according to TFA, the reason for the "sole source" agreement is because of a regulation otherwise requiring them to be a small business (they aren't, they have more than 500 people). So, according to TFA, that was the reason they had to do this and not because the Bush?/Obama? administration unduly applied pressure.
I could go on and say how, in TFA, some epidemiologists think it's a waste of money and how other, equally credentialed ones say it isn't. Still, please note that it DOES have a use beyond the original vaccine. If you get sick and don't get the original vaccine within four days, this will save you. Otherwise you die. Is that a waste of money? Reasonable people may disagree. (Smallpox the physical virus MAY* be present in only two locations but I believe its DNA sequence was published on the Internet).
Look, maybe the poorly written LA times article caused these mistakes in the summary. But that's what you get when you choose poor journalism. You should be prepared to put in the time and effort to get what is (hopefully) the true story behind the ill-presented facts.
*you could probably retrieve some from someone buried in the arctic prior to say 1950. That's how they retrieved the black plague recently.
The whole description is being partisan, and ignorant, and incomplete.
A) The government hasn't approved this. B) The VA system is government run and it's one of the best healthcare systems in the world. C) Pretty much every universal healthcare is better the what we have now.
Most of the arguments against an American universal healthcare system are based on the idea that *this* government wouldn't do a good job even if various European nations handle it well. If you consider other federal projects and programs to be a track record, it's difficult to argue against this. If you think this one thing is somehow unique and special, that people who display extreme corruption/cronyism and gross incompetence will somehow perform wonderfully when you put them in charge of a health system, please understand that you are proposing something contrary to reasonable expectation and there is a burden of proof that goes with that.
I notice in the EU corporations with business practices hostile to the customers actually do get slapped down once in a while by the regulators. If that were the norm here, I would have a lot more confidence that the government is representing the correct set of interests when it takes action. The situation in the USA is not a matter of whether such a system could work in theory or has worked for others. It's a matter of trust; there is none, and trust is a particularly difficult thing to earn back once it is destroyed.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
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?
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?
Obviously you haven't heard this
Hell, Cheney's relationships with KBR and Haliburton alone stand as a high water mark in corruption.
The fact that you didn't know that KBR was a subsidiary of Halliburton when Cheney was VP or that Halliburton has two L's, proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that you really have no clue as to what you are talking about. For that matter, the very fact that you believe something is compelling evidence that the opposite is true.
But, yes, Cheney did have extensive ties with Halliburton. It's kinda hard not to when you are CEO of the company.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
It's not a vaccine for first responders though. By some readings, it's not even a true vaccine, not being intended to provide immunity before catching the disease.
I'm also fine with giving first responders vaccines for stuff that they're fairly unlikely to encounter. Still, I think we need to consider the likelihood that smallpox will either somehow be released (perhaps by an unknown store), or redevelop in the wild. The first is fairly unlikely at this point, and the second would most likely simply be a similar virus – but one that isn’t affected by current vaccines. Don't forget that when it comes to terrorists, hearing that we have enough vaccine stockpiled for every american can be a reason to NOT bother with using it as a weapon. So just possessing the vaccine can be a deterant. Same idea with US units all being equipped for chemical warfare - our enemies are not as likely to try it in the first place.
As such, one needs to consider the monetary effectiveness of this move. Why? We still have limited dollars. $443M might be better spent(IE saving more lives) towards finally eliminating polio, treating obesity, as AIDS research, etc I think it's a legitimate question.
I don't read AC A human right
Did you read the article?
no, of course you didn't.
Do you know why they particular cure is valuable?
no, of course you don't.
". In June, the government settled the dispute by dropping the exclusivity provision. That limited the value of Siga's contract to $433 million and meant that other companies could compete to fill future orders for the drug."
So they stopped it from being the runaway expense and exclusive deal that Bush sought for them. But, lets blame Obama, cause we think he makes every decision there is. Lets ignore the fact that the company gave to both sides.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
But with further cuts to 'wasteful' government, we can return to the good ol' days.
Personally, I'd consider this a valid target for 'pork' spending. Expensive with no real prospect of providing serious benefit. The government doesn't even need to just NOT spend this money, spending it somewhere more effective is a valid alternative. There's plenty of options.
What about using this money to fund a poison control center(previously subject to attempted cuts)? They not only prevent unnecessary emergency room visits, they save lives. What about orphan drugs? Rural medical programs? Giving the EPA a bit more oomph to control toxin releases? The FDA to both properly test and quickly release potentially life saving drugs? Inspect our food sources a bit more thouroughly a bit more often?
There's a limited amount of money available, there's plenty of optimization available out there, and this is iffy enough to be a target.
I don't read AC A human right
Uhhh the same Ron Paul that said we should "go back to 1901" when it came to disasters while pointing out his home city while forgetting to mention it took them TWENTY FIVE YEARS to get back to where they were and the biggest gains from the disaster were by the uber rich, who could afford to buy out those that had lost everything at fire sale prices?
The answer to that would be YES! Paul has some good ideas when it comes to dealing with foreign lands (like not being the world's police) but frankly his domestic policies like most of the right wing are more than a little batshit. He believes waaaay too much in the almighty invisible hand when we have seen time and time again all the invisible hand does is allow those at the top to consolidate power. See the gilded age or what we have now for examples.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Can you not smell a bad cover story when you step in it? Did you never read about Howard Hughes, the CIA, and the Glomar Explorer? Sheesh, you people should turn in your tinfoil hats, you do not deserve them.
Hard saying what the $433 million is really buying, or where the money is going, but it is pretty obviously not going to a smallpox vaccine.
Will
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!
> the same Ron Paul that said we should "go back to
> 1901" when it came to disasters
I have no idea what that means or what context it was said in. But assuming he meant we should abolish FEMA, rescue aircraft, and good samaritan laws - so what? Is federal emergency response the single greatest issue facing America today?
No candidate will ever perfectly agree with any other thinking person. Pick your battles.
Identify the two or three problems you believe to be most fundamental, read up on a variety of theories to fix them, then see which candidate is closest to you on those core issues. Ignore everything else.
Paul has some good ideas when it comes to dealing with foreign lands (like not being the world's police)
That sounds like Obama talking. Also with the Libya thing it looks like we already have a President (and Secretary of State) who have learned a little something about how to walk that talk.
Like the parent post, I too have problems with Paul's faith-based economics. I mean, capitalism is the best theory we may have for explaining economic phenomena, but if it was a successful theory, then the USA would have foreseen and avoided the economic disaster that started in 2007, eh?
Capitalism needs to be recognized for what it is: a kind of emotional security blanket for those who do not want to be part of the 99% but are not willing to face up to the cold hard truth that you have to screw a lot of people if you want to get to the top of the heap.
Will
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.
One thing to consider is that Europe doesn't have a universal healthcare system. Nations that are in Europe do. In regards to size, most of these nations are more like states, so the equivalent would be universal healthcare at the state level. That's a lot more doable.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
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.
sometimes requirements are written in a way so that only the favored company can meet them
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
None of that is really true. The Greeks went broke because they run a tin pot third world country that pretends to be in Europe. No one seems to pay any tax at all and the government is corrupt and inefficient. The Irish went down because they followed NeoCon ideals and let unregulated financial and property markets go wild and then bailed out the banks to the tune of their entire economy. A few years ago they were being hailed as the Free Market dream of Europe. Italy is also corrupt and has been run for the last couple decades by a guy who was much more interested in having lots of sex than actually running the country.
Europe as a whole is doing ok, and the Euro zone is only screwed because they have a single currency and single interest rate across countries with vastly different economies and legal structures which doesn't work. This means that the countries with crappy economies can't get themselves out of trouble and the countries with good economies are getting dragged down.
In no way is Europe going broke because of Universal Health care. The few countries where you can place even some of the blame on social policies were basked cases to begin with.
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
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
You do remember when the U.S congress went kindergarden, and decicded it didn't wan't borrow to cover the deficit that the very same people passed as a budget.
The U.S is currently letting the money printing press make up for the deficit, like the southern European countries used to do. Now that they are in the euro - they suddenly find out, that they have to go through the Germans to do that - and the answer so far has been: 'Nein!'
Run with the lemmings, and you'll get your feet wet.
The parts suffering are those who got screwed by external forces imposing demands on them, and instead of being like Iceland and telling the multinational banks to shove it
This is a pleasant fiction being floated around the Internet. In reality, Iceland is seeking to solve its economic woes by joining the EU, ditching its sovereign currency, and adopting the euro -- hardly telling the banks and foreign interests to "shove it."
Breakfast served all day!
You've got this totally wrong - Greece has a HUGE government, AND low taxes. I'm pretty sure no US party is advocating that.
For example, Greeks get state pensions at 55 at 90% of earnings, and at 50 if you are in one of 580 hazardous professions (for example if you cut people's hair). In some situations, children can inherit their parents state pension when their parents die !
Plus no one pays any Taxes and the Greeks have spent the last 10 years running up debts to keep everything running, so now interest rates have gone up they are fucked.
Alex
Wow you are so wrong i don't even know where to begin with your wrongness. People don't want their land polluted? See Monsanto as to what you would have, where Monsanto pollutes your land with GMO spores and then sues your ass! In true capitalism he who has the gold makes the rules and if you have no gold you ARE the peasant in China.
And getting rid of the minimum wage? are you stoned or just insane? Did you not read where ALREADY walmart is giving training videos on how to get on food stamps because their pay is so shitty? you think having to pay LESS would make things better? Oh and the reason the poor are fat is because SHIT FOOD is cheap, whereas healthy food? EXPENSIVE. potatoes and fatty meats and HFCS is cheap as dirt but a decent cut of meat and decent non GMO veggies cost you an arm and a leg, not to mention the poor are working more hours than EVAR without being able to get ahead so they end up eating Mickey Ds because they are too fucking tired to cook!
But don't worry I predict the right wing will force through many of the things you desire, then we'll have our own Arab Spring! Capitalism is a failed system, with more than 60% of the wealth concentrated in so few hands you could put them all in a HS gym and have seats left over. As we have seen with OWS the embers are starting to catch, as they break out the dogs and the hoses it'll get a LOT nastier. Notice there is pretty much a news blackout of NYC now? They don't want you to see what is going on.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.