Captain Chirps Update

Hugh Hewitt continues to sound the alarm about the approach of H5N1 virus, aka avian bird flu. And as we've touched on it periodically, we serve our accustomed roll of being a ripple in the blogopond:

Even as work accelerates along the Gulf, the dangers from terrorism remain, and a new threat continues to approach: avian bird flu. Given that everyone who follows the subject sees the threat of an epidemic as a real possibility, the Adminsitration simply has to have a plan and it has to work. Today's Wall Street Journal's report on vaccine production is thus not comforting. (Subscription required.) Key information: The Department of Homeland Security gave Sanofi-Aventis Group a $100 million contract to produce a supply of the vaccine to thwart the killer flu. Other, smaller contracts have been let as well, but the gap between promised supply and obvious need is huge.

That's enough vaccine for twenty million people. The population of the United States is nearly fifteen times that size.

Double-H is hitting the panic button:

Look. This is a right now issue, with Indonesia reporting its fifth case just hours ago. The UN's chief health official is ramping up his warnings, and although the President emphasized the threat at his UN speech, the American public is not aware of the magnitude of the threat, and a plan to produce vaccine for 20 million people in a nation of 300 million when the disease may have as much as a 50% kill rate just isn't "preparedness."

A whole lot of money is about to gush out of the Congress, and while the recovery effort on the Gulf deserves its priority status, the Congress should appropriate whatever it needs to in order to get the supplies of the necessary drugs up and running.

If this is a linear proportion, that would mean a billion and a half dollars, or over 130 times less than the fiscal gusher headed toward Dixie. Seems like a good investment to me.

To give you an idea of what a pandemic could look like, I recommend the first half of Stephen King's The Stand. Captain Chirps isn't as lethal as Captain Trips, but with some estimates setting the worst case worldwide death toll at over a billion - fifty times the number of dead from the famous 1918-19 Spanish flu epidemic - it's more than harrowing enough, and reason enough to move "pre-emption" efforts and backup preparedness into high gear.