One of the prevarications that Bush is presently spreading, to avoid taking any responsibility for the flu vaccine shortage, is that vaccine manufacturers are afraid to produce the flu vaccine because of litigation. Fascinating, then, that we have no shortage of, say, DPT vaccine, MMR vaccine, chicken pox vaccine, polio vaccine, hepatitis vaccine... heck, even yellow fever vaccine.
It is also interesting that, not being aware of any litigation over the flu vaccine, all I could find on the Internet were a handful of apparently unsuccessful lawsuits - three between 1976 and 1990 - alleging that the flu vaccine caused Guillain-Barre Syndrome (a form of peripheral polyneuritis characterized by pain and weakness and sometimes paralysis of the limbs, cause unknown).
Meanwhile, why no mention of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, or the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which have removed most vaccine-related injuries from the courts?
So it does not appear that there is any appreciable litigation over the flu vaccine, some very effective "tort reform" measures are already in place to protect both manufacturers and consumers, so... could Bush be "making stuff up"? Um... yeah. that would be it.
I tried to reason with some doctors on "tort reform" recently. One decared that Edwards personally caused malpractice premiums to skyrocket in North Carolina. Apparently, even after he stopped practicing.
ReplyDeleteMaybe everything is Edwards' fault. Darn those trial lawyers, misleading us about Iraqi WMD's, letting Bin Laden get away, putting up all sorts of bad 'Internets' to confuse the American people about the draft.... Darn them!
I wonder if they even believe it themselves.
ReplyDeleteAfter all, the flu vaccine was stopped because the UK stopped it--and they have a loser-pays system.