I love The Washington Monthly, print and blog. My December issue just got here today (in Milledgeville, the mail is slow). A favorite feature, available online, is "Tilting at Windmills" by Founding Editor Charles Peters. One bit of it focused on flu shots:
...the CDC should have the power to order that shots be given first to the people who need them most and then according to a fair system of priority. It also should be able to allocate the vaccine so that supplies are available to meet those priorities. This year's shortage was clear by early October. But the CDC failed to act, and on Oct. 16, a Washington Post headline told us “Flu Vaccine Allocation in Area Haphazard, No System Exists for Haves to Share Supplies with Have-nots.� The CDC should also be responsible for telling people what's going on. As late as Oct. 21, Gardiner Harris of The New York Times reported “local and state officials are complaining that their federal counterparts have given them almost no information to deal with the shortage.� The problem is that the CDC did not want these responsibilities. Its director, Dr. Julie Gerberding, said “imposing federal controls over this process would probably make a big mess.� It was already a big mess, Dr. Gerberding. If government did not fill the need, who would? Some things simply have to be done by the government. The real question is not whether government should do them, but how to make sure government does them right. (Emphasis mine.)Finally, on Nov. 10, Dr. Gerberding overcame her market principles and announced a plan for rationing the vaccine according to need. By this time, the CDC controlled only 10 million of the 50 million shots that were available in early October. Furthermore, the CDC is allowing freelancers like New York mayor Bloomberg to import the vaccine from abroad. Your ability to get a shot may depend less on your need than on the enterprise of your mayor. So far a lot of people have been getting the vaccine who are not exactly priority cases, including many twenty-something congressional aides, not to mention many of their healthier bosses.
The allocation mess never got sorted out. Today USA Today is reporting that some states have extra vaccine and are being advised by the CDC to expand their eligibility pool while other states are not able to immunize their high risk population. The upshot is several million high-risk Americans will not be getting the vaccine.
