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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.'"
"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.
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."
google "synthesis of smallpox". Bringing it back is easy. Smallpox has an interesting combination of infectiousness, fatality rate, and countermeasures. My guess is that a weponized smallpox could be done for 10-20 million.
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
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
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
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
So it's fine to piss away $443mn because it's less than $70bn?
Do you code? If I'm trying to improve the performance of a program I've written, I might notice little things here and there that could be done a bit faster. For example, I might have be saying pow(x, 2) someplace, and I know that for integers, it's far more efficient to just type x*x. I'm not wrong, that would be faster. And yet, if I waste any time fixing that type of stuff, I'm an idiot. You profile the program, you find the sections where your code is spending the most time on, and you fix that. If the profiler is telling you that the pow function is the problem, then you fix it. Otherwise I've spent a lot of time fixing things and my code will still perform super-slow.
It's not fine to piss away $443 mn. That said, it's also not fine to waste resources trying to fix that problem when there are bigger problems to be fixed. Fix the bigger problems first, then go back to the $443mn when it actually does represent a significant portion of the problem. Otherwise you waste a lot of time only to discover we're still just as broke.
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.
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.