Flu vaccine bungle - now for the cover-up

In a letter Tuesday to the FDA, Rep. Henry A. Waxman of California, the senior Democrat on the House Committee on Government Reform, said that a confidential source inside the FDA told him that the office of acting FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford had received documents describing the FDA's findings at the Liverpool plant and addressing "whether the flu vaccine crisis could be prevented."

The agency has so far refused requests from Congress and the media for copies of FDA inspection reports and other documents describing problems at the Chiron plant, including the results of an inspection in June 2003, about the time Chiron acquired the facility.

Because of problems at the plant in Liverpool, England, almost 50 million doses of flu vaccine were withheld from the market this year, about half of the U.S. supply.

Waxman quoted the source as saying that Crawford or someone in his office had "made a decision not to release these documents to Congress until after the election."

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Yet another set of documents not to be released before the election. I wonder how many truck loads of shit are to be dumped November 3. And, just supposing the election would actually go off fairly (I know, I know, but play along here for a minute, I'm building to something), and suppose that John Kerry would be elected. There could be a whole lot of information that would find its way to the light of day in that case, and it could be very, very, very bad news for BushCheneyCo. I'm talking prosecutable stuff. So, considering the long shot of a fair election and a Kerry win, what might BushCheneyCo do in the three months left to them in office? It has been suggested that there will be a lot of document shredding going on. No doubt. They could quietly take on other actions that would completely cripple a Kerry administration. There's another alternative: a state of emergency. The POTUS is endowed with the right to declare a federal emergency and declare martial law - literally suspend the Constitution. You think removing the w's from typewriters is shocking....

Waxman and the Republican chairman of the government reform committee, Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, asked for the FDA documents on Oct. 13. But last week, Davis granted Crawford more time to produce the documents and refused to grant Waxman's request to subpoena them, arguing that the FDA was too busy to assemble the requested documents.

...In a brief statement Tuesday, Davis said he agreed to a delay in the release of the information at Crawford's request to "let the FDA focus for the time being on the problem of finding and distributing more doses of the vaccine - because our priority is public health, not election-year politics."

Oh yeah, releasing those documents would really distract them. What in the name of Sam Hill were they doing back when they should have been focusing on a possible backup for vaccine? Smoking crack?

While patients are panicking over a shortage of flu vaccines in the United States, vaccination programs in the rest of the world are progressing normally with a good supply of medicine, health authorities say.

...Most countries contract with several vaccine manufacturers, in part to avoid critical dependence on one supplier. And though countries other than the United States had placed orders with Chiron for portions of their vaccine needs, no other country was so dependent on the Liverpool factory.

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So the Bumbling Bush Administration mismanages yet another aspect of government. We're not a country, we're a freaking Woody Allen movie directed by an 8th-grade video class.

Say goodbye to Grandma. Or maybe you could wrap her in plastic and duct tape.



Update 12:21pm: I see Bob Harris' readers have other ideas about what Bush will do afer November 2.