Michael Chertoff Was (Almost) Right

Correction: ThinkProgress.org incorrectly dated Chertoff's trip to Atlanta on Monday 8/29, the day Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. In fact it was Tuesday 8/30. Sometime Monday night, Mike Brown called Chertoff to say things were spiraling "out of control." That "red alert" should have caused Chertoff to reschedule the avian flu meeting to focus all of his attention on Katrina. Thanks to CactusPat for catching this error! Plus the Friday before, Leo Bosner, who runs the unit that alerts officials of impending crises, emailed Chertoff about Katrina's "growing strength -- and of the particular danger the hurricane posed to New Orleans." See what I get for defending a Bushevik?

Michael Chertoff is taking a lot of heat for going to a meeting about the avian flu in Atlanta while Katrina was hitting New Orleans on the morning of Monday August 29.

But I'm going to do something I rarely do: defend a Bushevik. Under the circumstances, Chertoff did the right thing. FEMA director Mike Brown had not yet sounded the alarm - he did not do so until later that night.

But my reason for defending Chertoff is not bureaucratic, it's substantive: Avian Flu is a Big F'in Deal, as Lori Price of Citizens for a Legitimate Government has been pointing out for months. Here's a major report from ABC News.

Avian Flu: Is the Government Ready for an Epidemic?
Virus Poses Risk of Massive Casualties Around the World
Brian Ross, ABC News Chief Investigative Correspondent

Sept. 15, 2005 — It could kill a billion people worldwide, make ghost towns out of parts of major cities, and there is not enough medicine to fight it. It is called the avian flu.

This week, the U.S. government agreed to stockpile $100 million worth of a still-experimental vaccine, while at the United Nations Summit in New York, both the head of the U.N. World Health Organization and President Bush warned of the virus' deadly potential.

"We must also remain on the offensive against new threats to public health, such as the Avian influenza," Bush said in his speech to world leaders. "If left unchallenged, the virus could become the first pandemic of the 21st century."

According to Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, Bush's call to remain on the offensive has come too late.

"If we had a significant worldwide epidemic of this particular avian flu, the H5N1 virus, and it hit the United States and the world, because it would be everywhere at once, I think we would see outcomes that would be virtually impossible to imagine," he warns.

Already, officials in London are quietly looking for extra morgue space to house the victims of the H5N1 virus, a never-before-seen strain of flu. Scientists say this virus could pose a far greater threat than smallpox, AIDS or anthrax.

"Right now in human beings, it kills 55 percent of the people it infects," says Laurie Garrett, a senior fellow on global health policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. "That makes it the most lethal flu we know of that has ever been on planet Earth affecting human beings."

 

OK, we've been warned. So what are the Busheviks doing to prepare for a pandemic?

The man in charge of making sure Americans are prepared in the event of a killer flu epidemic is the secretary of Health and Human Services.

"We would do all we could to quarantine," says Secretary Michael Leavitt. "It's not a happy thought. It's something that keeps the president of the United States awake. It keeps me awake."

"We would do all we could to quarantine" - that's the plan??????????

Once a pandemic begins, trying to quarantine those who are actually sick will be impossible. Most people don't run to the doctor when they get a fever, so they will go about their lives exposing families and neighbors. Those who go to the doctor will expose everyone there - staff and patients - and everyone exposed would theoretically have to be quarantined. And where in America would thousands of people be quarantined - the Superdome???

The draft report of the federal government's emergency plan, obtained and examined by ABC News' "Primetime," predicts as many as 200,000 Americans will die within a few months. This is considered a conservative estimate.

"The first thing is everybody in America's going to say, 'Where's the vaccine?' And they're going to find out that it's really darned hard to make a vaccine. It takes a really long time," said Garrett of the Council on Foreign Relations.

In fact, the draft report says it will not be until six months after the first outbreak that any vaccine will be available, and then only in a limited supply.

So forget about stopping the pandemic with a vaccine - once it begins, it will spread out of control. (See vaccine update at the bottom.) Will 55% of us die? It depends if we can get Tamiflu from Switzerland. And thanks to Bush's neglect, the answer is no.

While there is no vaccine to stop the flu, there is one medicine to treat it. Called Tamiflu, it is made by the Roche pharmaceutical company in Switzerland. Roche has been selling Tamiflu for years.

Only recently, however, did scientists learn of its potential to work against the killer flu, H5N1. That has since created a huge demand and a critical shortage.

"All of the wealthiest countries in the world are trying to purchase stockpiles of Tamiflu," says Garrett. "Our current stockpile [in the U.S.] is around 2.5 million courses of treatment."

According to Leavitt, that is a long way from the country's ideal stockpile. "Our objective is to have 20 million doses of Tamiflu or enough for 20 million people," he says.

He later admitted that only 2 million are currently on hand, but asserted that no other country is in a better position.

Officials in Australia, however, have 3.5 million courses of treatment, and in Great Britain, officials say they have ordered enough to cover a quarter of their population.

"I think at the moment, with 2.5 million doses, you are pretty vulnerable," warns professor John Oxford of the Royal London Hospital.

"The lack of advanced planning up until the moment in the United States, in the sense of not having a huge stockpile I think your citizens deserve, has surprised me and has dismayed me," he admits.

Faced with worldwide demand, the Roche company, which produces Tamiflu, has organized a first-come, first-served waiting list. The United States is nowhere near the top.

"The way we are approaching the discussions with governments is that we are operating on a first-come, first-serve basis," says Dr. David Reddy, head of the pandemic task force at Roche.

"Do we wish we had ordered it sooner and more of it? I suspect one could say yes," admits Leavitt. "Are we moving rapidly to assure that we have it? The answer is also yes."

When asked why the United States did not place its orders for Tamiflu sooner, Leavitt replied, "I can't answer that. I don't know the answer to that."

Even leading Republicans in Congress say the Bush administration has not handled the planning for a possible flu epidemic well.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., says the current Tamiflu stockpile of 2 million could spell disaster.

"That's totally inadequate. Totally inadequate today," says Frist, who is also a physician. "The Tamiflu is what people would go after. It's what you're going to ask for, I'm going to ask for, immediately."

Leavitt says deciding who gets the 2.5 million doses of Tamiflu currently on hand in the United States is part of the federal government's response plan.

So who will get those doses? Based on what we know about Bush policies, here's an informed guess:

• Everyone in the Bush White House
• Republicans in Congress
• The Republican National Committee
• Republican donors

After you multiply each of these people by 10-20 family members, there won't be a single dose of Tamiflu left. After using the very last dose on his dog, Dick Cheney will go on TV to tell Pat Leahy and the rest of America to "go fuck yourselves."

In the end, even the country's top health officials concede that a killer flu epidemic this winter would make the scenes of Katrina pale in comparison.

"You know, I was down in New Orleans in that crowded airport now a couple weeks ago," Frist says. "And this could be not just equal to that, but many multiple times that. Hundreds of people laid out, all dying, because there was no therapy. And a lot of people don't realize for this avian flu virus, there will be very little effective therapy available early on."

All because the Busheviks weren't paying attention and ended up at the back of the line for Tamiflu.

So Michael Chertoff needs to go to meetings about Avian Flu - lots of meetings. And he needs to come up with a plan that is a whole lot better than the one we have now.

1. U.S. poultry farms need to be strictly monitored for any outbreaks - both animals and workers.
2. U.S.-bound flights from overseas cities need to be cancelled when the first confirmed human-to-human transmission occurs in that city.
3. Limited doses of Vaccine and Tamiflu need to go to health care workers before Republicans, so they can treat the rest of us before the whole country is wiped out.

And of course we must Impeach Bush Now!!!!!!!!

Update: on Thursday, Levitt ordered $100 million worth of vaccine from Sanofi Pasteur. The vaccine is hopefully a preventative cure, not just a post-infection treatment like Tamiflu, but it may not work if a strain ultimately spreads that is significantly different from the one being tested in the lab. The contract calls for 20 million doses; unfortunately they won't be ready until the 2008-2009 flu season. Until then...

In May 2004, Sanofi contracted with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease to make 8,000 doses of an investigational avian flu strain, and last September, HHS contracted Sanofi to make about 2 million doses of bulk vaccine derived from those strains.