mojo city bird flu

We need a new
Manhattan Project
for the Bird Flu.

a consideration of the coming disaster, by Cody Barstow, Ph.D., (and fence rider for the Barstow Ranch)

Bird Flu.

During the Second World War, the United States government recognized that private industry could not do it all. Nor did it trust them enough to do so.

So the president did not wait for private enterprise to figure out a way to make money from developing The Bomb and then build it. Instead, the government basically said sod off to private industry and developed the atomic bomb itself in what came to be called the Manhattan Project.

The government knew it had to walk point on that thing. It made The Bomb by gathering the best and brightest, giving them the facilities they needed to create this thing from the smoke of imagination, and they did it. For good or ill.

Today, it appears this government is hanging back, waiting for private industry to figure out a way to make money out of a vaccine to save us from massive waves of death from Bird Flu. The results of waiting could literally kill us.

We're being told it will be 3 to 5 years before we have the facilities to actually produce enough Bird Flu vaccine for the 300 million people of this country.** That's 3 to 5 years of opportunity for the Bird Flu to mutate into a lethal person-to-person version of itself. That's 3 to 5 years of us waiting for the first infections and waves of pandemic to hit before the vaccine is ready.

There's no time for that. Tens of millions of us in this country alone could die rather horrible, strangling, lungs fluid-filled deaths of suffocation before that time comes, 3 to 5 years from now.

As this is being written on 23 November, 2005, the Chinese have suddenly released a statement that the bird version of the Bird Flu has reached very serious levels. "The government is making all efforts to combat bird flu, which is a serious epidemic in China," Liu Jianchao, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, told reporters at a routine briefing.++

The upshot -- The U.S. government must bypass private enterprise and launch a new Manhattan Project to develop a Bird-Flu vaccine and production capabilities capable of inoculating the American public within one year.

We cannot expect to have more time than that. If we even have a year.

***

** This is the word from Michael Leavitt, Health & Human Services Secretary during an interview with Tim Russert on Sunday morning, the 20th of November, 2005. He appeared with CDC Director Dr. Julie Gerberding, and the NIH's Dr. Anthony Fauci. All of them, to a person, seemed quite adjusted to the idea of we, the people, should be satisfied with waiting 3 to 5 years for production facilities to be developed. None of them, to my recollection, ever indicated that 3 to 5 years was too long, nor did they offer ideas on how to shorten that time period.
Podcast available at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032608/

++ From an Associated Press report, in the Billings Gazette, http://www.billingsgazette.com/
index.php?id=1&display=rednews/2005/11/22/ build/world/45-birdflu.inc

***

Taking Direct Action

How we beat this thing.

9 out of 10 infected kids in Thailand died from Bird Flu.

Is using the 50% kill-rate irresponsible fear-mongering?

What else can be done?