Word: farness
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...Chan's admonitions seem prescient. Rich countries' hoards have become massive surpluses, and many nations are now trying frantically to cancel pending orders of vaccines or transfer them to poorer nations. France, which had ordered enough of the vaccine to inoculate its entire population of 60 million, has so far used only 5 million doses and now wants to cancel 50 million doses and sell millions more. Similarly, the Netherlands has a 19 million-dose order for sale to other countries, while Germany is in talks with drug manufacturers to halve its order of 50 million doses and sell...
...officials initially thought the vaccine would require two doses instead of one, and many countries signed contracts with manufacturers under that assumption; it turned out that a single dose was enough to build immunity. But the main reason for the surplus is simply that demand for the vaccine fell far short of what was originally expected. Now, after governments have spent billions of dollars on vaccines that were not needed - France alone spent $1.25 billion - some politicians and health professionals are looking to hold someone accountable...
...part to countries' own pre-existing pandemic-preparedness plans. Many such plans, which were put in place in the mid-2000s, were based on the worst-case-scenario assumption that the next pandemic virus would be some variation of the highly lethal H5N1 bird-flu virus, which has so far killed 263 people. The U.K.'s plan, for example, which was automatically enacted when the WHO declared the H1N1 pandemic, predicted between 50,000 and 750,000 deaths from a flu pandemic. So far, there have been 400 British deaths from H1N1...
...government, for its part, still wants to vaccinate as many people as possible against H1N1. Although it has indeed been a mild flu season so far, says Jeff Dimond, a spokesperson at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "our message right now is that people should get vaccinated. We are aware that a third wave of infections is possible, so we aren't making any decision yet on whether we will use our full capacity of 251 million doses...
Though many provisions critical to reform will likely be cut under this process, their displacement should not be too heavily bemoaned. While the scope of the resulting bill will probably be far narrower than reformers had hoped, we believe that Congress should take up these crucial measures in the future, when there is less antagonism between the two parties and more opportunity for compromise. History leaves reason for optimism. The original Social Security bill in 1935 covered far fewer people than it does today, but efforts in subsequent years capitalized upon its passage to include addenda that expanded its welfare...