Flu shot

Chaos has erupted on the flu shot lines. No surprise: that's what always happens when a commodity is genuinely precious - in fact, a necessity - and there just isn't enough to go around. So it will probably get worse.

"Seventy-year-old Homer Fink spent eight hours sitting next to a supermarket Halloween display for a flu shot that he wasn't able to get at five other places. The scene was repeated across the country as the nation's suddenly limited supply of flu vaccine was drained.

In state after state, people lined up at pharmacies and supermarkets in the middle of the night: old folks with oxygen tanks, sleeping children bundled up in strollers, people in wheelchairs. In the San Francisco area, a 79-year-old woman died Thursday from head injuries after collapsing from exhaustion. She had waited four hours in a flu shot line with hundreds of other seniors. Two elderly women in Concord, Calif., were hospitalized after collapsing in a vaccine line."

And, wouldn't you just know it? The British say that Bush knew the shortage was coming.

"British health officials said Friday that their American counterparts were informed in mid-September that problems at a drug manufacturing plant in northwest England could disrupt influenza vaccine supplies to the United States.

Records at Britain's Department of Health show that the plant's owner, Chiron Corp., warned officials of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the British Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency on Sept. 13 that potential contamination problems remained unresolved at the plant, according to Alison Langley, a senior spokeswoman at the department.

The British account is at odds with statements by U.S. health officials that they were caught by surprise. "

Is it my imagination, or is this kind of crap a distinct pattern with this administration?

Needless to say, the Bushies deny that they were informed by the British, even thought the British, um, have records that prove it. Surprise, surprise. In for a dime, in for a dollar. They've lied about everything, why stop now?

The lack of a vaccine will kill more people this year than died on 9/11.

Bush doesn't care about that: there is no glamour in it. There's no opportunity for him to dress up in a flight suit, blow things up or swagger around like a bad actor in a "B" Western.

For the tiniest fraction of the money that Bush squandered in his giveaway to the rich, he could have placed an order for enough flu vaccine to cover every single person in the country. Every single one.

But why would he care? He and his cronies have no shortages. They get all the medicine they want.

It's only you and me who get screwed.