Superflu Vaccine!Follow

Oh noes! Captain Tripps!!!?1111!!!

Nice.

That's a silly approach to inadequacy. By that logic we shouldn't do heart transplants, deliver aid after a disaster or save a single person from a sinking ship if we can't manage to get them all.

Methinks somebody resents that he isn't on any of those lists. Yeah, it sucks being just an ordinary snowflake, doesn't it?

I guess I'm just looking at it from a mass panic point of view. Lets say we do make the 20 million vaccines. Lets say it does make the jump to humans and it kills just 15% of the people it infects and infects 1/3 of the population. So now you have 1 of every 20 people dropping dead.

Now people I know and love are dropping dead, and yet I know there are people with lifespans of less than 2-3 years who are getting the vaccine. There are people that are in positions of power getting vaccinated over children. Not only that but on my tax dollar. People that don't even pay taxes are getting the life saving vaccine that I helped pay for over my family?

There are far too many ethical questions to only attempt to produce that much vaccine. If your not going to make more than 10% then don't make it at all. When people start to panic they will kill whoever and destroy whatever stands between them and that vaccine. If we can only afford to cover 10% of the population then we better spend that money on a cure and not a vaccine



For the record if they used the same priority system they use now for the normal flu vaccine now I would be on the list anyway as a parent of a child under 6 months old.

I'm not a microbiologist but my Discover Channel level understanding was that H5N1 would need to mutate to become the sort of person-to-person contagion that Stand quality pandemics are made of. And that, if it did mutate, there's no telling whether or not a vaccine made for H5N1 would work on the new strain -- in fact, chances are it would not. Am I wrong here?

This isn't about Bush, I doubt he sat down with a sheet of notebook paper and a pencil and made this plan up all by himself. I'm just wondering if it's going to be even remotely effective.

The phrase for today is "Market Failure". Learn what it means. Learn it's importance with regard to when it's correct for the government to step into something.

In the case of vaccinations, it is correct for the government to handle things, since there is no profit for private industry to do so, so the market will not cause the desired result.

The conservative position is not a blanket "Government should never get involved in anything". It's about having a sepecific set of criteria for when that should happen. I'm frankly still amazed at how many people don't get this, and try to equate a position on the government involving itself in the production of Televisions to one on the government involving itself in the production of vaccines. Sigh...

What a fu[i][/i]ck-wit!

A Pandemic is likely to shove millions into the coffers of the pharmaceutical giants.

Silly, Silly gbaji

Most Governments are prioritising key workers (healthcare, law & order etc.) to have first access to prophylactic or remedial drugs. The Pharma Industry would rather keep the net cast as wide as possible.

Regardless of what you prats are pontificating about, I just wanted to point out that the title of this thread looks like "Superfly Vaccine!"

I did. It's pretty obvious people are just going to disagree on when it occurs, or is occuring. This is what virtually every artile on the topic acknowledges.

Further, some people simply don't believe that they exist at all:


Moe, for example, claims to follow this line of thinking.

The only thing I'll add to the discussion is that there are diseases, such as HIV/AIDS which, if there was an acutal cure found, it would be a huge hit to the drug industry.

Yeah. But that's what distinquishes "conservatives" and "libertarians". A fallacy that I see all the time is the assumption that there's this big political line and everything to the left of center is "liberal", and everything to the right is "conservative". There are many aspects of each, and that's an incredibly simplistic model to use.

If we're to look purely at the power and scope of government as it relates to domestic living, the "classic liberalist" would say that governments only role is to create an environment for people to live. It's responsible for protecting the nations borders from foreign incursion, and to deal with foreign matters (heads of state, trade, etc), and that's about it (some concessions for road building and such is included in the trade part of it). That's the kind of state people like Locke were talking about when they started the whole liberalist movement.

When the industrial revolution rolled along, it was realized that due to the change in the type of labor, there could exist an environment where most of the people could not realize opportunity. A farmer could, through his own labor, improve his lands and become wealthy. A wage earner in a factory could not. With a huge shift in labor from one to the other, there was a fear among the liberalist thinkers that this would produce a very class separated society (which was the opposite of what they wanted). A realization that there was a need for "dignity" among the workforce appeared. Afterall, the point of the whole thing was to build a society where everyone could achieve to their full potential without arbitrary restrictions. A school of thought arose that if the economic structure ensured that for many citizens, full potential could not be reached, then this would detract from the society as a whole (and cause lots of problems like riots and revolt). The thought was that one should correct for the imbalance that industrialized society created by shifting "capital" from the haves to the have-nots. Thus, the "social liberalists" were born. Their agenda was to engineer society to counter the imbalances imposed by an industrial workplace to allow for the "pursuit of happiness" for all people regardless of status.

This caused a problem though, since it was quickly realized that the only way to provide that capital to those who could not obtain it themselves, they had to take it from someone else. This ran directly counter to Locke's (and others) ideas that private property, free from government reposession, was the key to liberty. The "dignity versus liberty" argument arose as a result. This bubbled down into a compromise solution of "moderates" or "conservative liberalists", who believed that there was value to government providing aid to the people domestically, but *only* in cases where the market could be shown to fail. This applies to a broad range of things. But it's a basic recognition that we as a people *can* look at the outcome of market events and decide when the result is negative or positive and regulate the market to prevent "market failure". This is what the conservative position in the US is about.


Obviously, there's always disagreement over what and when something is a market failure. And you'll get a whole range of folks between those that tend strongly towards the liberal position (anything that can be improved by government intervention or regulation should be) and those that tend strongly towards the libertarian position (nothing should be constrolled by the government). Most are somewhere in the middle between those two extremes. Most conservatives accept that government should tax it's people, and it should use those taxes on domestic programs that can be shown to be "needed". The key difference between conservatives and liberals is that "needed". Conservatives define "need" as something that cannot be provided via the normal market process (can *only* result if government gets involved). Liberals tend to approach the problem by proposing that all things that *can* be controlled/regulated by governemnt should be. Thus, we have liberals espousing things like universal health care, universal education, universal housing, government job placement, government wellfare for those who can't get jobs, etc, while conservatives tend to oppose most of those to some degree.


Scary thing is that's the short version of this issue. It's actually far more complex then that. I only covered some very basic domestic program issues of the different "sides". My main point is that it's incredibly flawed to just call everyone who's not "Liberal" a conservative. We do tend to do that, but it's incorrect. It's more accurate to place Libertarians at one end of a spectrum, Liberals at the other, and Conservatives in the middle.

But them I'm undoubtably biased... ;)

Libertarians aren't really at the end of the conservative-liberal spectrum, they're at a different corner of the diamond.

Reason being that they don't want the government in our personal lives, either.

fu[b][/b]cking allakhazams

Edited, Wed Nov 2 12:21:27 2005 by bodhisattva

In all fairness, the people thinking up these plans of action have little connection to the real world. You don't really expect them to come up with a way to defeat this, do you?

I don't expect anyone to until a few million people have died through trial and error. (Or at least that's what I hope. I have a list of first picks, too. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.)