Has everyone forgotten about the Swine Flu fiasco? 

Congress just passed legislation, tacked onto the Department of Defense budget under the guise of national security and in the dark of night, which grants sweeping immunity to the drug and vaccine manufacturers. 

While it may well be true that the avian flu will become a pandemic, there is little evidence thus far to suggest that at this point.  (There has been, to date, no known sustained human-to-human transmission.)  Given the hysteria generated concerning swine flu (and the damage that was caused as a result of it), and other over-hyped diseases like SARS, however, it might behoove us to be circumspect about the prospect.   

More important, the public must never lose sight of one critical fact:  the responsibility of drug and vaccine manufacturers is to their stockholders, not their customers.  The job of the drug/vaccine manufacturers is to promote the health of their companies.  Their obligation is not to promote the health of consumers. 

It is only the free market and independent government oversight which protects the consumer.  Whenever the government interferes with either one of those, it is courting disaster. 

In fact, the perfect business plan would be one where a) everyone was required to use a product, b) a company had no responsibility for any damage caused by their product, and c) their product caused the need for additional products. 

This is not to say that the drug companies would deliberately harm the public.  Only they know whether or not that is true. 

However, it is the job of the government to make sure, as much as is possible, that the drug companies’ best interests are only served when the consumer’s are as well.   It is not the job of government to do just the opposite, to protect Big Business at the expense of the consumer. 

Congress’s recent action did just that.   

And including protection for the vaccine (and even drug manufacturers) under the guise of protecting our nation and troops is nothing short of shameless. 

The protections they afforded the vaccine manufacturers do not serve our troops or our Nation. Is this what our troops are fighting and dying for?  To protect the vaccine and drug manufacturers from damage they might cause?  Or are they fighting and dying to preserve the freedom of all Americans? 

To top it all of, new information has come out that the flu vaccine may not even work, just as many of us have long believed. 

How much craziness are we going to tolerate? 

by Sandy Gottstein (Mintz)