Bird (Flu) Watching

I'm glad to see President Bush moving on preparing the nation for the approaching Captain Chirps pandemic. But it seems that, unless this is a mere downpayment on a much more ambitious plan, it's a case of swatting a Buick with a fly.

These portions were particularly underwhelming:

President Bush outlined a $7.1 billion strategy Tuesday to prepare for the danger of a pandemic influenza outbreak, saying he wanted to stockpile enough vaccine to protect 20 million Americans against the current strain of bird flu.

Not that I am pushing nationalization of this effort by any means, but aren't there 300 million Americans? I know that this vaccine stockpile would be earmarked for soldiers and first responders, but what about the rest of us? From what I've read on the subject, even the young and healthy would be "at risk".

This was a very effective context for countering the incessent left-wing litigation war against the pharmaceutical companies, as well as spurring advances in technology and efficiency of anti-flu drug production.

But then came the other trap door:

[T]he Administration plan, to be released in more detail on Wednesday, calls for more than stockpiling shots. It will stress a new method of manufacturing flu vaccines - growing the virus to make them in easy-to-handle cell cultures instead of today's cumbersome process that uses millions of chicken eggs - as well as incentives for new U.S.-based vaccine factories to open.

Such steps will take several years to implement, but the hope is that eventually they could allow production of enough vaccine to go around within six months of a pandemic's start.

I'm no virologist, but I am something of an amateur historian, and by my reading of the previous flu pandemics to which the President referred (1918-19, 1957, 1968), at six months after the start of a pandemic, hasn't the disease largely run its course? I know that mutations can be random and rapid, and that makes having a huge advance vaccine stockpile less than entirely practicable. But wouldn't the capacity to produce enough vaccine to go around in, say, six weeks be a better goal?

The fictional Captain Trips, a genetically-engineered shifting-antigen virus with 99+% communicability and lethality, killed 99.4% of humanity within two weeks. The very real Captain Chirps reportedly has communicability and lethality in the 50-55% range, though that is from an as-yet statistically insignificant sample population. By comparison, the 1918 Spanish flu, had 33% communicability and 2-3% lethality, and still managed to kill nearly a million Americans and tens of millions worldwide.

I am a professional number-cruncher, and if Captain Chirps has the reputed communicability with even 10% lethality, that would compute to somewhere in the vicinity of fifteen million U.S. deaths.

Bah. Enough with the ominous speculation. I sat through an hour of this sort of over-the-top melodrama Sunday night on the History Channel. I'm not going to start intoning like the program's narrator that by the end of the bird flu plague, "there will not be enough living to bury the dead." The very nature of Chicken Little-ism is that you are guaranteed to almost always be embarrassingly wrong. The worst, in other words, almost never happens.

Almost, that is. And if we're preparing for the worst - whether a naturally occurring plague or a biological attack - I sure hope that we'll do a lot better than what the President has initially proposed.

Because our very lives may depend upon it.

{*cough, ahem*} Sorry, I guess melodrama is also communicable....