Nov. 8th, 2009
Getting ready for Ida
Nov. 8th, 2009 07:43 pmThe Hurricane Information Center: Getting ready for Ida
Online volunteers needed for bunches of things!

Online volunteers needed for bunches of things!

The Swine Flu Vaccine Screw-up
Nov. 8th, 2009 10:18 pmThe Swine Flu Vaccine Screw-up

But let's stop a minute and also ask: Who really screwed up here -- the government or private pharmaceutical companies, including GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, and three others that had agreed to manufacture and deliver the vaccine by late fall? Last spring and summer, those companies gleefully gobbled up $2 billion worth of government contracts for vaccine production, promising to have every American, or at least every American child and pregnant woman, supplied with vaccine before trick-or-treating season began.
According to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the government was misled by these companies, which failed to report manufacturing delays as they arose. Her department, she says, was "relying on the manufacturers to give us their numbers, and as soon as we got numbers we put them out to the public. It does appear now that those numbers were overly rosy."
