CLG Pandemic Action Alerts 14 Jul 2009 Petition against mandatory vaccines; contact the White House, US Congress--More flu news here.

By Dave Lindorff

The outbreak of a new swine flu in Mexico, and the potential threat
of a new global pandemic, shines a bright light on a major weakness in
the United States—an employment system where most workers are not paid
or even face getting let go if they get sick and have to stay home from
work, combined with a broken healthcare system where roughly one in six
people have no ready access to a doctor.

What the American failure to mandate employer-paid sick-days means
is that most Americans who don’t feel well go to work anyway, in part
for fear of losing their jobs, and in part because they are already
living so close to the margin that they cannot afford to miss a few
days’ pay.

Sean Gonsalves writes: 

The major news outlets have been giving lots of coverage to yet another dreadful warning coming from the Bush administration -- the looming "bird flu pandemic." (Cue the sound track of Hitchcock's classic "The Birds").

Best case scenario, reports the Associated Press, a minimum of 200,000 people will die from an avian flu pandemic, but it could be as many as 2 million deaths in America alone. Yikes.

Ah, the power of fear. Edmund Burke, the intellectual father of conservatism, would be impressed. In Burke's "On the Sublime and Beautiful" (1757), he wrote: "No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear."

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?