PTSD

Pop Quiz

You’re holding a set of hearings on Flu Pandemic Preparedness. These hearings are intended to establish what has been done and what needs to be done to react or prevent a pandemic. You have the chance to bring in the leading scholars in medicine, history, public health, and social science. What do you do?

a) give each witness a totally useless two- or three-minute period to speak to the committee,

b) include the author of a recent book that, while not terribly groundbreaking, is popular and “a good read,”

c) fill the panel of experts with the presidents of several pharmaceutical companies to give verbal commercials for their own products, while providing absolutely no useful information or suggestions for pandemic preparedness,*

d) make jokes about how hard it is to contact those experts who have not attended, rather than granting extra time for those who do attend,**

e) spend time informing the audience, who probably already know who everyone is, about the credentials of the panelists, thereby making it abundantly clear that the heads of the pharmaceutical companies don’t have the faintest idea what’s going on,

f) demonstrate once again that the trappings of informed democracy are little more than theater. And not very good theater, at that.

g) All of the above.

Three guesses as to what C-SPAN had on this afternoon. Is there any wonder I want to move to Upper Canada, where I can live in the woods and avoid stupidity in all its shapes and forms?

I think of it as my “personal responsibility” response to health issues. Because, as someone recently told me, the best person to make medical decisions is *obviously* the uniformed consumer of health care.

Or, judging by what I watched today, an uninformed Senate Appropriations Subcommittee.

Idiots.

* I would like to note that those speakers who were trained in some sort of applicable field had interesting things to say, things that TPTB need to hear. They just had to talk fast, because if anyone went over three minutes the Committee members bluntly asked them to wrap it up. Wouldn’t want those vaccine manufacturers to lose any time, after all.

**Dr. Godley got a zinger back in, when she noted that she wouldn’t spend time talking about vaccines, since they shouldn’t be the sole focus of public health preparedness. Take that, Big Pharma. She also noted the better response of Cuba to Hurricane Katrina. Joanne Godley is my new favorite public health official. I hope whoever cut her short chokes on some Senate Bean Soup. Wait, it was Arlen Specter. Nope, still hope he chokes. He asks long-winded questions, too.***

Idiots. Idiots. Idiots.

***Specter doesn’t seem to know the difference between this possible pandemic and a pandemic being inevitable. But it’s okay, because Harkin wants to give out annual flu shots at Walmart. To everyone. And put a regional lab in Alaska, because he isn’t sure how far apart Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are.

At least he seems concerned about the idea of states (including those that just spent all their money paying for hurricane damage) being able to afford pandemic preparedness and not-yet-created vaccine stockpiles.

I can’t decide if this is just a futile exercise or the most terrifying example of the incompetence of government that I’ve witnessed in a very, very long time.

posted by Elizabeth @ 7:51 PM