Who Caused the Vaccine Shortage?

This topic makes it possible to kill three birds with one stone.  We must conserve ammunition, for I fear we’re in for a long fight.  The three “birds” that present such an easy target are:

1. The Failure of Liberal Ideas in the Real World
2. Government Run Healthcare
3. Media Bias

Where did today’s vaccine shortage come from?  If you believe Obama, the liberals, and the media formerly known as mainstream, Bush is responsible for it all.  Of course, Obama blames all the ills of the world all the way back to the Garden of Eden on Bush.  A very small bit of detective work will show you that Bush had nothing to do with the vaccine shortage we are having today.

Take a look back to 1993 and Hillary Clinton’s “Vaccines for Children Program.”  First of all, she was the First Lady (and I use the term loosely) at the time, so she had no business meddling in the affairs of government.  But everyone knows who wears the pants in the Clinton family.  Bill can’t keep his on, so Hillary has to.  Anyway, like any good liberal she stirred up a crisis out of nothing and used fear to get government to effectively take over part of the pharmaceutical industry.  Using one of the top five fear-cheers from the left, Hillary started chanting that vaccination rates were too low and children were going to die if the government didn’t step in and make vaccines more affordable.  As the Wall Street Journal article from 2003 explained, the vaccination rates were actually already quite high, and the vaccines themselves were already free to the truly needy through programs such as Medicaid.

So what did Hillary do?  She convinced lawmakers to go along with her price controls scheme by buying 55% of the vaccines at a government mandated half price (Hillary wanted the Government to buy 100% of the vaccines, but congress didn’t go along, thankfully).  She does what all under-educated, over-idealistic liberals do, she confused COST with PRICE.  Regardless of what the liberal press and politicians are saying about “big pharma,” their profits have generally been around 2% per year.  Does that sound like excessive or windfall profits?  Let’s say the COST to develop and manufacture a certain vaccine is $100, and that cost is just to break even.  Now the government comes in and says you MUST sell them your vaccine at $50.  You will now lose money anytime you produce that vaccine, so you quit producing it and move on to something else that will make a profit, or you go out of business.  That is EXACTLY why we have a vaccine shortage today.  As the WSJ article says, thirty years ago  “25 companies produced vaccines for the U.S. market. Today only five remain, and a number of critical shots have only one producer.”  That was in 2003.  I’m sure the situation hasn’t improved since then.  I do know we are relying on foreign producers to manufacture much of our vaccine supply.  The results of Hillary’s program at improving vaccination rates in children?  Vaccination rates “barely budged,” but she did manage to drive our suppliers out of business and set us up for shortages and failure in the years since.  This is EXACTLY what is going to happen to the entire healthcare system when government gets its nose under the tent.  You’ve been warned.

Before I move on, I’ll provide another example of why government price controls achieve the opposite of their stated intent.  I’ll use price controls on housing as a prime example.  Look at New York and San Francisco where price controls were implemented by the government to, as they claim, make housing more affordable and available for lower-income families.  So now apartment landlords can only charge the arbitrarily set price set by the government for his tenants.  As in the vaccine example, this price doesn’t provide enough money to cover the costs of maintenance and upkeep.  So the buildings fall into disrepair, the landlords get taken to court, ordered to stay in their own buildings, and do repairs.  The landlord files bankruptcy because he can’t raise enough money for the repairs because of price controls, the building is condemned, and the supply of housing GOES DOWN and the PRICES GO UP.  Another effect of the price controls in this case is that in some of the buildings tenants saw the writing on the wall and banded together to buy building and in effect turn it into a “gated community.”  They pay their share of the mortgage and an association fee for upkeep.  This further reduces the supply of rental housing which drives price and demand upward.  Quinn’s First Law of Liberalism:  Every liberal law achieves the exact opposite of its stated intent.

We’ve seen how liberal ideas fail in general, and specifically in the area of healthcare and housing.  Now let’s take a quick look at how the willing liberal media are covering it up.  After Hillary drove the vaccine suppliers out of business, the media said not one disparaging word about her involvement in the debacle.  But a few years later when the shortages were again rearing their ugly heads during the Bush administration, the liberal media jumped on Bush like a June bug on a turd.  They blamed him for everything under the sun.  Now we’re eight years further down the road under the reign of the mOssiah, the consummate liberal.  The swine flu vaccines WERE promised, but they aren’t being delivered because we no longer have the capacity to produce them.  The administrations efforts to deliver these vaccines, led by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, have been laughable at best.  They originally set an arbitrary date to have x number millions of vaccines ready, but didn’t check first to see what could actually and realistically be delivered.  Now they don’t even know when produced batches will be delivered and WHERE because they have no tracking system in place.  They couldn’t be doing a better job of screwing this up by the numbers, yet we go back to the liberal media formerly known as mainstream who refuses to do OBJECTIVE reporting.  They utter not one word of criticism of Mao-bama and his flunkies.  Unbiased reporting?

Now to ice the turd cake with excrement icing.  We don’t have enough vaccine (even though what we have may not be safe) for our law-abiding citizens.  So what is our government who loves us so deeply, and cares for our every need going to do about it?  Prison inmates are being given the vaccines, terrorists held in the Guantanamo Bay prison are getting the vaccines, and they are considering taking 10% (or more) of our already short supply and giving it away to 3rd world countries.  Thanks for nothing, Obama.

Once upon a time, America gave away anything you could imagine to countries around the world out of our excess.  That excess was generated by capitalism.  Now that we have elected the enemy, and that enemy is doing everything they can to destroy capitalism, our ability to produce has fallen below what is needed to provide for our own citizens.  Now we see who our government REALLY loves as they give now not from our excess, but at our citizen’s expense.

Hope and change?  I hope you enjoy it.

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http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=56269

Sebelius: Feds Knew H1N1 Vaccine Supply Was Not Enough to Cover At-Risk Americans–Still May Donate Doses to Foreign Countries

Thursday, October 29, 2009
By Penny Starr, Senior Staff Writer
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Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told reporters and people watching streaming video on the flu.gov Web site on Wednesday that supplies of the H1N1 vaccine are increasing but that the government knew amounts of the immunization would be limited. (CNSNews.com/Penny Starr)

(CNSNews.com) – Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said the federal government has known all along there would not be enough H1N1 vaccine to cover all at-risk Americans and that plans to donate a percentage of the U.S. supply to foreign countries is still under consideration.“We knew from the outset–everybody knew from the outset–we would not have enough to immunize the 150 million Americans who fit into those five priority groups,” Sebelius said during a Wednesday press conference at HHS headquarters in Washington, D.C.

(See complete article by clicking the link above, or HERE)

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‘America’s Smartest Woman’ Is Making Us Look Stupid

Hillary only stuck with Bill because it kept her close to the seat of power, and by not throwing Bill to the wolves she held power over him.  She is a power hungry enabler just like her new boss.  She’ll throw him under the bus if given the opportunity.  In the meantime, she just runs around the world making America look like fools.  That may actually be true if you look at who we have elected as our representatives and to the highest office in the land.  The liberal plan for public education has finally come to fruition.

‘America’s Smartest Woman’ Is Making Us Look Stupid

by A.W.R. Hawkins (more by this author)

Posted 04/01/2009 ET

Hillary Clinton is best remembered for blaming the accusations against her husband on a “vast right wing conspiracy” (until he was forced to admit that he was giving a different dog a bone) and blaming her 2008 Democrat primary losses on the anti-female sentiment in certain parts of our country. (No, not anti-female.  Just anti-beyotch.) But who is she going to blame for her disastrous debut as secretary of state?

Can we blame the president? No; his foreign policy experience is even less than hers. And, yes: her entire foreign policy experience was kissing the late Yasser Arafat’s wife on the lips and embarrassing her hubby on a China trip by making a plea for women’s rights to a group assembled by the Chicoms to listen politely to her. But I digress.

Now Hillary, long considered “America’s smartest woman” by people like Elton John and James Carville, is taking her blame game and her conditional loyalty to the world as our Secretary of State.

Her debut was a meeting with the Russian foreign minister, to whom she presented what was supposed to be a “reset” button, making light of Obama’s desire to make nice with the bad guys. The button, though, wasn’t labeled “reset.” Instead, due to the fine work by her staff, it had the Russian word for “overload” (like an electronic circuit) painted on it. So while it’s obvious that Hillary ain’t the Great Communicator, it gets worse.

Her recent trips to China and Mexico prove this point.

En route to China for her February 20-22 visit with Chinese leaders, Hillary wasted no time in criticizing others for problems the U.S. is facing with North Korea. She polished up the old refrain “it’s Bush’s fault” by intimating that North Korea has nukes because of the failed policies of former president George W. Bush.

Hillary believes Bush failed to keep North Korea within the parameters of an agreement they signed while Hillary’s husband was president. But gatewaypundit.com has duly noted that the “North Korean regime [has] violated the agreed framework almost from the time it was signed during the Clinton years.”

And what retribution did they face for this violation during the Clinton years? None.

Once Hillary landed in China, she went from blaming Bush to turning her back on core Democrat constituencies like Amnesty International and pro-Tibetan support groups, both of which are outraged over China’s violations of human rights. Instead of calling Chinese leaders out on their mistreatment of whole classes of humanity, Hillary said, “[E]fforts to press China on issues like Taiwan, Tibet and human rights ‘can’t interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crisis.’”

Hillary tried to clarify her reasoning by adding that there’s no use talking human rights with the Chinese because, “We pretty much know what they’re going to say.”

Since when is knowing what someone is “going to say” a valid reason for not doing what ought to be done?

In the German publication Spiegel, Günter Nooke, of the Christian Democratic Union Party, described the methods of America’s smartest woman as “very questionable.” He explained that the reason she really didn’t want to do anything to offend Chinese leaders was because her trip was part of a larger effort to seek “out fresh Chinese loans for the deeply-indebted American government.”

To put it succinctly, Hillary’s visit with Chinese leaders was conducted from a position of weakness. And such a mindset barred our inept secretary of state from standing up for Tibetans, the Taiwanese, or any other people group that China regularly assaults and threatens, for fear of financial loss.

Slate’s Annie Applebaum, a left leaning journalist, put it this way: “I…care quite a lot about what the new administration is going to do about human rights on the ground, and, to date, both Clinton and Obama have been utterly silent on that score.”

When Hillary traveled to Mexico last week, she further epitomized the sad state of our current administration by demonstrating that their refusal to call China on the carpet for obvious wrongs China had committed would not keep them from blaming America for wrongs that America had not committed.

Our smartest-woman-turned secretary of state told Mexico’s President Calderon that America had “a co-responsibility” for the violence currently overtaking Mexico: “Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade. Our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border to arm these criminals causes the death of police officers, soldiers and civilians.” (It doesn’t matter that we KNOW  that the weapons that the liberals are speaking about were given to the MEXICAN GOVERNMENT by our government and then stolen from the Mexican government by drug cartels, or given to the drug cartels by sympathizers/moles within the military.  This is just a way to build uninformed sympathy for an illegitimate gun ban in this country.)

Isn’t anyone responsible for their own actions anymore? And wouldn’t it be more accurate to point out that Mexico’s violence is the result of the fact that they’re an anti-capitalist third world country with a population largely comprised of laborers whose own government robs them of the chance to better themselves?

Yet it just keeps getting worse. From Monterrey, Mexico, America’s smartest woman told Calderon: “[The] partnership that you have created…between the public and the private sector is a model that we and others will look towards.” I guess this means we, in America, would be better off by living like citizens of the third world instead of citizens of an industrialized one?

I fear that America’s smartest woman has yet to understand that she’s not just a first lady anymore: her words mean something now that she’s become secretary of state. And not only is she setting us up to pay financial reparations by taking “co-responsibility” for the crimes of another nation, she’s actually making America look internationally impotent by lacking the backbone to demand that the Chinese uphold human rights or the clarity of thought needed to see that Mexico’s political structure eliminates any possibility for paupers to go from rags to riches.

Hillary’s trips to China and Mexico, and the words she used while in each country, confirm that we’ve no longer an administration that’s proud of this country, its values, or its accomplishments. Gone for now are the days when America deals from a position of strength.

HUMAN EVENTS columnist A.W.R. Hawkins has been published on topics including the U.S. Navy, Civil War battles, Vietnam War ideology, the Reagan Presidency, and the Rebirth of Conservatism, 1968-1988. More of his articles can be found at www.awrhawkins.com.

“You do not know the power of the Dark Side.”

Bobby, by jove, you’ve got it! Obama IS Emperor Palpatine. Would that mean that Rahm Emanuel is Darth Vader? Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi aren’t smart enough to be anything other than battle droids. John Murtha must be Jabba the Hutt. Sadly, the rebellion can’t seem to find any real Jedi to champion our cause and save us from the Dark Side. I can see someone like Ted Nugent in the role of Han Solo. Perhaps we will find that the force is strong with some of the up and comers such as Bobby Jindal. “Help us, Obi Wan. You’re our only hope.”

‘Once the crisis has abated, I will lay down these powers’

Posted By Bobby Eberle On March 27, 2009 at 6:58 am

With money comes power, right? That is how the old saying goes. If that is the case, then it should surprise no one that with all the money pouring out of Washington (actually China), that the move to consolidate power would closely follow.

This week, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner released details of the Obama administration’s plan to further inject government control over the private sector. If Obama and Geithner have their way, more financial institutions will be forced to “report in” to the government and have restrictions placed on what the institutions and the investors can and can not do with their money. With each passing day, Obama and company are chipping away at America.

The premise of this new Obama/Geithner plan is to do something about “toxic assets,” which the government is now calling “legacy assets,” because it sounds less… well… toxic. As the Heritage Foundation describes in a new report, these assets represent “securities and loans held by financial institutions whose value is uncertain in the wake of the financial crisis.”

Under the proposed plan, “the idea is to use federal funds to facilitate the purchase of toxic (or what Treasury now calls “legacy”) assets by public-private investment groups, which would bid against each other for the assets.”

For “legacy” loans, private investors would provide 1/14 (about 7 percent) of the partnership’s total assets, matched by another 1/14 provided by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The remaining amount (6/7 of the total, or about 85 percent) would be covered by guaranteed loans provided by FDIC. For “legacy “securities (as opposed to loans), up to five fund managers pre-qualified by the Treasury Department would raise private capital that would be matched dollar-for-dollar by the government. Treasury would also provide loans to enable the partnership to purchase even more assets.

In both cases, while the government would share profits equally with the private-sector partner, taxpayers bear most of the risk of losses. In other words, the private-sector partner cannot lose more than its investment. Any further losses after the private capital is gone would be covered by the taxpayers.

The Heritage Foundation notes multiple flaws in this plan. In particular, “the plan will almost inevitably lead to even more expanded government micro-management of financial firms.”

Recent history with the TARP program shows that participants in PPIP (“Public-Private Investment Program”) can expect controls—sometimes retroactive—over compensation and other management decisions. It is hard to imagine a hedge fund or other investment group enjoying profits under this program without some level of federal restrictions accompanying the deal or following soon thereafter. It is equally possible that if profits exceed some unspecified percentage, there will be an effort to “recapture” them.

This big-government plan has thankfully drawn swift opposition. As noted in the news story Financial overhaul plan draws GOP opposition, not only do some lawmakers and business people reject more government intrusion, they also question whether it would accomplish the specified result.

“We’re not in this mess because we need new rules,” said Bill Fleckenstein, a Seattle-based hedge fund manager who accurately predicted the housing bubble. “We need to enforce the rules we already have,” he said. “What we had was a complete breakdown by all our regulators. They simply didn’t do their jobs.”

We don’t need new rules? We just need to enforce the ones we have? Sounds eerily similar to what conservatives have said about immigration reform and a host of other issues!

Some of Geithner’s proposals as reported in the news story include:

• Imposing tougher standards on financial institutions that are judged to be so big that their failure would threaten the entire system.
• Extending federal regulation for the first time to all trading in financial derivatives — exotic instruments such as credit default swaps that are blamed for much of the economic carnage.
• Requiring larger hedge funds and other private pools of capital, including private equity and venture capital funds, to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
• Creating a regulator to monitor the biggest institutions. Geithner did not say which agency should wield such authority, but the administration is expected to favor the Federal Reserve.
• Empowering the government to take over major nonbank financial firms such as insurers and hedge funds if deemed necessary.

The last thing America needs is more control transferred to the federal government. Once control is taken by Obama, the next logical step is to seize more power. No one ever gives it back.

Begin Side Note

• Being a fan of Star Wars, I can’t help but recall Emperor Palpatine’s words as he was granted even more power by a willing society: “It is with great reluctance that I have agreed to this calling. I love democracy. I love the Republic. Once this crisis has abated, I will lay down the powers you have given me!” (Yeah, right. And I’m the inventor of the internet.)

End Side Note

Obama goes on television with his townhall press conference, answers softball questions from an audience that is growing more and more dependent on government, and he just smiles. He smiles because he knows that he is moving America exactly in the path that he wants… a path toward socialism.

This Geithner plan is just one more step in lulling the American public into placing more power in government. Thankfully, more legislators are speaking up, and more of the public is taking notice. But will it be too late?