Disregarding, for now, a rant on commercial hog farming being morally condemnable and possibly dangerous to the environment, I’m curious as to why in, in 2009, we don’t have enough people or resources to work on more than one flu vaccine at a time. We’ve been making vaccines for how many years now? If anything this shows us there are definitely some areas where those trillions of dollars spent in Iraq could have been better utilized. I mean training scientists and building more research labs might have been a good start, and we probably could have done it for only a several billion dollars.
Specter to switch to Democratic party. There is no such thing as a Democrat or a Republican. There are just politicians.
Best comment I’ve read on the web today:
“WAPO articles suck but I love reading the comments.”
Coffee break is over. I have to go get my summer schedule straightened out and buy a decent antihistamine.
Peace and Pollen
Specter will never switch. But he may lose to a neocon of the worst order, after which a democrat will win that Senate seat. A win-win situation.
As for hog farms… a pig swill by any other name still stinks! Factory farms are not just “possibly dangerous” to the environment. They are a clear and present danger, and pollute wells for miles around with bacteria and ammonia derivatives.
sauerkraut’s last blog post..Penn State Fraternities snared in pot ring arrests
But he did switch krauty.
Only one reason why I don’t eat meat.
I remain speechless. Cannot believe he ran from taking on Pat Toomey.
sauerkraut’s last blog post..Republican Senator Arlen Specter switches parties
Is the rest of the state as stunned as you are?
Maybe. Perhaps. I dunno.
Guess we should all be thankful that it’s Arlen not Phil.
sauerkraut’s last blog post..Republican Senator Arlen Specter switches parties
Factory farms are an abomination, seriously.
YUP, POLITICIANS.
great comment find.
all good things (coffee breaks) must end
g’s last blog post..Not for nothing
Coffee breaks return though, a sure thing.
I loved that comment because everyone knows it’s true.
Brer Kraut, Specter switched today, didn’t he?
Doug’s last blog post..Yoke
Glad to see you are on top of this Doug.
yeah… dunno how I’m gonna do campaign work for someone that conservative on so many issues. he’s got more integrity than most politicians but dayum.
sauerkraut’s last blog post..Republican Senator Arlen Specter switches parties
Money spent on current flu-vaccine technologies and production would probably be money wasted. The problem is that influenza viruses mutate more quickly than the six months now needed to bring a vaccine to market, and it’s not now possible either to predict what mutations are likely to happen (for example, the one(s) that allowed the current swine flu both to jump to people from pigs and to be transmissible from person to person) or to design/produce vaccines that cope with all relevant possibilities – which would increase the resources needed, and their costs, by several orders of magnitude. We would pay huge amounts of money for something that doesn’t work (most flu vaccines, in fact, don’t work). Don’t we get enough of that from MicroSoft?
Money is most needed to fund research on ways to improve the effectiveness of vaccines and shorten their production times. For a product with almost no shelf life and, therefore, very limited profit potential especially in a recession, this money is hard to come by. Ask We the People for it, and you’ll get tea parties. I mean, my God, if We pay for it, one of those illegal Mexicans might get it.
The Roman Emperor Caligula named his horse to the Senate. It performed better than most of the incumbents. Not to mention the Emperor.
the amoeba’s last blog post..Is This What They Mean By ‘Marbled Meat’?
Do you have a horse you’d like to volunteer Amoeba?
That’s what I mean though, trillions could have been spent on speeding up the process surely the whole developing vaccine thing could be more expedient for a few trillion.
The thing about the flu vaccine, is that it’s made every year. The flu bug is constantly evolving, so pharmacists can’t just formulate one vaccine to take care of it. And these crazy flu bugs (bird flu, swine flu) are ones that are much MORE resistant to vaccines, and the flu would probably just run its course before a vaccine for it COULD be made.
Angela’s last blog post..Ask me ANYTHING.
Yea, Like I sad and amoeba hinted at the process has not sped up in some time and we are now in 2009 the process should be much faster and probably could be if the money were spent on it instead of war.
I mean I’m thinking Star Wars here, maybe one day the flu, a week later a vaccine, that should be in the realm of possibility in the 21st century.
“There is no such thing as a Democrat or a Republican. There are just politicians.”
That’s probably the single most important thing we all need to know. Other than what’s on t.v. on a given night.
Yeah, and we have TV guides for the later. The other should just be taught in school.
WAPO is major suckage sometimes. Spector’s defection, for his own self interest, should temper some of this right and left arguing. It’s all the same, it’s only the dressing which changes.
The amoeba is right the money is needed to help figure out how to do this stuff quicker, a trillion would have gone along way to help in this.
john’s last blog post..Darfur Reads
I read it daily though, so if you read a sucky paper I guess you’re a sucker, right?