Swine Flu

The Professor as Entrepreneur: Chief virologist in Holland under fire over drugs firm link

JayV — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 19:50:25 -0500

Cross posted at Blazing Indiscretions and The Poetry Tree.

I am not sure which is wackier, the disaster politics of the H1N1 vaccine or ethics standards at Erasmus University Medical Center, a teaching hospital in Rotterdam. Ab Osterhaus, chief virologist at Erasmus, has advised the the Dutch government and international agencies (WHO, for one) on approaches to fighting the flu pandemic and has even recommended that the government purchase flu vaccines. DutchNews.nl reports he works part time for—and has a 10 percent share in—the university-owned ViroClinics which is researching a flu vaccine.

Anton Westerlaken, chairman of Erasmus MC, told the Telegraaf professors have to become a shareholder in any company set up under university auspices to exploit a patent. Any profits are divided 80% to the university and 20% to the professors involved, he said.

Osterhaus told the paper he had done nothing wrong. 'I have always said I am involved in that company and shares are all in the game,' he said.

Earlier this year the Professor denied having shares in the companies making vaccines.

Of course, as a powerful institution clearly worried about its reputation, Erasmus has covered its ass today with a perfunctory statement (Dutch) stating that there is no conflict of interest. But it owes the public a thorough explanation of how and why Professor Osterhaus' initially lying about his connection to profit-making companies did not violate medical center ethical guidelines. Was Erasmus aware of that? If so, why didn't they do something about it?

Flu Nightmare: In Severe Pandemic, Officials Ponder Disconnecting Ventilators From Some Patients

Edger — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 19:13:11 -0500

from Sheri Fink, ProPublica,
September 23, 2009 (view source)

With scant public input, state and federal officials are pushing ahead with plans that -- during a severe flu outbreak -- would deny use of scarce ventilators by some patients to assure they would be available for patients judged to benefit the most from them.

The plans have been drawn up to give doctors specific guidelines for extreme circumstances, and they include procedures under which patients who weren’t improving would be removed from life support with or without permission of their families.

The plans are designed to go into effect if the U.S. were struck by a severe flu pandemic comparable to the 1918 outbreak that killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide. State and federal health officials have concluded that such a pandemic would sicken far more people needing ventilators than could be treated by the available supplies.

Many of the draft guidelines, including those drawn up by the Veterans Health Administration, are based in part on a draft plan New York officials posted on a state web site two years ago and subsequently published in an academic journal. The New York protocol, which is still being finalized, also calls for hospitals to withhold ventilators from patients with serious chronic conditions such as kidney failure, cancers that have spread and have a poor prognosis, or "severe, irreversible neurological" conditions that are likely to be deadly.

New York officials are studying possible legal grounds under which the governor could suspend a state law that bars doctors from removing patients from life support without the express consent of the patient or his or her authorized health agent.

State and federal officials involved with drafting the plans say they have been disquieted by this summer’s uproar over whether Medicare should pay for end-of-life consultations with families. They acknowledged that the measures under discussion go far beyond anything the public understands about how hospitals might handle a severe pandemic.

By every indication, state and federal officials expect to weather this year’s flu season without having to ration ventilators. That assumes that the H1N1 virus will not mutate into a more serious killer, the vaccines against it and the other seasonal flus will continue to prove effective, and any dramatic surges in the number of patients in need of ventilators will occur in different parts of the U.S. at different times.

In recent months, New York officials have met three times with physicians, respiratory therapists and administrators to rehearse how their plan might play out in hospitals in a severe epidemic. In one of those “tabletop exercises,” participants suggested that the names of triage officers charged with making life and death choices among patients at each hospital should be kept secret. The secrecy would be needed, participants said in interviews, to avoid pressure and blame from colleagues caring for patients who were selected to be taken off life support.

When they posted their plan on the web in coordination with a video conference in 2007, New York officials promised to solicit public input. Since then, they have consulted with medical and legal professionals and other experts, but few members of the general public, and the plan has remained unchanged. They declined to make the comments they have gathered immediately available for review, and those comments are not published on the Health Department's Web site.

In the initial proposal, officials called public review “an important component in fulfilling the ethical obligation to promote transparency and just guidelines.”

The academic publication of the plan envisaged the use of focus groups to solicit comment from “a range of community members, including parents, older adults, people with disabilities, and communities of color.” Those have not been held.

Beth Roxland, the current executive director of the New York State Task Force on Life and the Law, said the ethicists included in the state's planning process focused largely on vulnerable populations. "Even if we didn’t have direct input from vulnerable populations," she said, "their interests have been well accounted for." Roxland said that public comment solicited when the ventilator plan was posted on the Health Department Web site was "sparse."

Dr. Guthrie Birkhead, Deputy Commissioner of the Office of Public Health for New York State said he wondered whether it was possible to get the public to accept the plans. "In the absence of an extreme emergency, I don’t know. How do you even engage them to explain it to them?"

Even so, other states, hospital systems and the Veterans Health Administration—which has 153 medical centers across all states -- have drafted protocols that are based in part on New York’s plan. The inclusion and exclusion criteria for access to ventilators, however, are different. For example, under the current drafts, a patient on dialysis would be considered for a ventilator in a VA hospital in New York during a severe pandemic, but not in another New York hospital that followed the State’s plan, which excludes dialysis patients. The VA’s exclusion criteria are looser because the patient population it is charged with serving is typically older and sicker than in other acute care hospitals. Different states, reflecting different values, have also established different criteria for who gets access to lifesaving resources.

The Institute of Medicine, an independent national advisory body, is expected to release a report on Thursday morning, at the request of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, that will recommend broad guidelines to help guide planners crafting altered standards of care in emergencies.

Questions about how hospitals would handle massive demand for life support equipment arose when New York state health department officials ran exercises based on a scenarios involving H5N1 avian influenza.

“They kept running out of ventilators,” said Dr. Tia Powell, director of the Montefiore-Einstein Center for Bioethics and former executive director of the New York State Task Force on Life and the Law, which was asked to address the problem. “They immediately recognized this is the worst thing we’ve ever imagined. What on earth are we going to do?”

Officials calculated that 18,000 additional New Yorkers would require ventilators in the peak week of a flu outbreak as virulent as the 1918 pandemic. Only a thousand machines would be available, the officials estimated. The state’s acute care hospitals in 2005 had about 6000 ventilators, 85% of which were normally in use. A moderately severe pandemic would have resulted in a shortfall of 1256 ventilators, health officials found.

In 2006, New York planners convened a group of experts in disaster medicine, bioethics and public policy to come up with a response. After months of discussion, the group produced the system for allocating ventilators. They first recommended a number of ways that hospitals could stretch supply, for example by cancelling all elective surgeries during a severe pandemic. The state has also since purchased and stockpiled 1700 Pulmonetic Systems LTV 1200 ventilators (Cardinal Health Inc., NYSE) -- enough to deal with a moderate pandemic but not one of 1918 scale.

Officials realized those two measures alone would not be enough to meet demand in a worst-case scenario. Ventilators were costly, required highly trained operators, and used oxygen, which could be limited in a disaster.

The group then drew up plans for rationing of ventilators. The goal, participants said, was to save as many lives as possible while adhering to an ethical framework. This represented a departure from the usual medical standard of care, which focuses on doing everything possible to save each individual life. Setting out guidelines in advance of a crisis was a way to avoid putting exhausted, stressed front line health professionals in the position of having to come up with criteria for making excruciating life and death decisions in the midst of a crisis, as many New Orleans health professionals had to do after Hurricane Katrina.

The group based its plans, in part, on a 2006 protocol developed by health officials in Ontario, Canada which relied on quantitative assessments of organ function to decide which patients would have preference for an intensive care unit bed. The tool, known as the Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA) score, is not designed to predict survival, and not validated for use in children, but the experts adopted it in light of the lack of an appropriate alternative triage system.

This summer, New York officials brought the state’s plan to groups from several New York hospitals for the tabletop exercises. They met behind closed doors to assess how hospitals might implement the proposed measures if the H1N1 pandemic turned unexpectedly severe this fall. In the fictional scenario, paramedics were ordered not to place breathing tubes into patients until physicians “can assess whether they meet the criteria to be placed on a ventilator.’’

Problems were immediately apparent. Dr. Kenneth Prager, a professor of medicine and director of clinical ethics at Columbia University Medical Center, was concerned about the lack of awareness of the plan among the larger public and the majority of the medical community. Societal input “is totally absent,” he said. “Maybe society will say, 'We don’t agree with your plan. You may think it’s ethically OK; we don’t.'"

The protocol, he said, would also place a great burden on clinicians charged with selecting which patients would be removed from life support. “We facetiously dubbed them the ‘death squad’ or the ‘guys in the back room’,” Prager said. He envisioned family members breaking down and screaming when they found out their loved ones would be disconnected from ventilators. “That’s the horror show of it. It really is a nightmare.”

Even so, he felt that the plan – and its effort to save the greatest number of patients – was ethically appropriate. “If we don’t use triage, people will die who would have otherwise been saved,” he said, because a number of ventilators are “being used to prolong the dying process of patients with virtually no chance of surviving.”

Doctors at the exercises feared that they would be sued by angry patients if they followed the draft guidelines. “There’s absolutely no legal backing for physicians,” said Lauren Ferrante, a medical resident at Columbia University Medical Center. “Who’s to say we’re not going to get sued for malpractice?”

New York State law forbids doctors from removing living patients from ventilators or other life support except in cases where the patient has clearly stated such wishes, for example in a living will, or through his or her legal health care agent. Other sources of liability could come from federal and state anti-discrimination laws or claims of denial of due process.

New York officials said they were currently working out legal options for implementing the plans, such as gubernatorial emergency declarations or emergency legislation.

“You can take something today that’s not necessarily active and overnight flip the switch and make it into something that has those teeth in it,” said Dr. Powell, who served on the committee that drafted the plan.

Dr. Powell cautioned that it is critically important to maintain flexibility in the guidelines. Any rationing measures taken in a disaster must be calibrated to need and severity.

Some states, including Louisiana and Indiana, have adopted laws that immunize health professionals against civil lawsuits for their work in disasters. Other states, including Colorado, have drawn up a series of relevant executive orders that could be applied to address these issues.

Dr. Carl Schultz, a professor of emergency medicine at the University of California at Irvine and co-editor of the forthcoming textbook, Koenig and Schultz’s Disaster Medicine (Cambridge University Press), is one of the few open critics of the establishment of altered standards of care for disasters. He says the idea “has both monetary and regulatory attractiveness” to governments and companies because it relieves them of having to strive to provide better care. “The problem with lowering the standard of care is where do you stop? How low do you go? If you don’t want to put any more resources in disaster response, you keep lowering the standard.”

Federal officials disagree. “Our goal is always to provide the highest standard of care under the circumstances,” said Ann Knebel , deputy director of preparedness and planning at the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, Department of Health and Human Services. “If you don’t plan, then you are less likely to be able to reuse, reallocate and maximize the resources at your disposal, because you have people who’ve never thought about how they’d respond to those circumstances.”

..............................

Dr. Sheri Fink has reported on health, medicine and science in the U.S. and from every continent except Antarctica. Since 2004 she has been a frequent contributor to the public radio newsmagazine PRI’s “The World,” covering the global HIV/AIDS pandemic and international aid in development, conflict and disaster settings. Her articles have appeared in such publications as the New York Times, Discover and Scientific American. Fink's book War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival (Public Affairs, 2003) won the American Medical Writer's Association special book award and was a finalist for the Overseas Press Club and PEN Martha Albrand awards. Fink has taught at Harvard, Tulane and the New School. Most recently she was the recipient of a Kaiser Media Fellowship in Health from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Swine

Edger — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 09:38:13 -0500

The 1976 swine flu outbreak, also known as the swine flu fiasco, or the swine flu debacle, was a strain of H1N1 influenza virus that appeared in 1976. Infections were only detected from January 19 to February 9, and were not found outside Fort Dix.[1] The outbreak is most remembered for the mass immunization that it prompted in the United States. The strain itself killed one person and hospitalized 13[citation needed]. However, side-effects from the vaccine caused 25 deaths.[2][citation needed]
On February 5, 1976, an army recruit at Fort Dix said he felt tired and weak. He died the next day and four of his fellow soldiers were later hospitalized. Two weeks after his death, health officials announced that swine flu was the cause of death and that this strain of flu appeared to be closely related to the strain involved in the 1918 flu pandemic. Alarmed public-health officials decided that action must be taken to head off another major pandemic, and they urged President Gerald Ford that every person in the U.S. be vaccinated for the disease. The vaccination program was plagued by delays and public relations problems, but about 24% of the population had been vaccinated by the time the program was canceled. Only one person, the Fort Dix army recruit, died from the flu.[3][citation needed]

There were reports of Guillain-Barré syndrome, a paralyzing neuromuscular disorder, affecting some people who had received swine flu immunizations. This syndrome is a rare side-effect of modern influenza vaccines, with an incidence of about one case per million vaccinations.[4] As a result, Di Justo writes that "the public refused to trust a government-operated health program that killed old people and crippled young people." In total, less than 33 percent of the population had been immunized by the end of 1976. The National Influenza Immunization Program was effectively halted on December 16.

Overall, about 500 cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS), resulting in death from severe pulmonary complications for 25 people, were probably caused by an immunopathological reaction to the 1976 vaccine. Other influenza vaccines have not been linked to Guillain-Barré syndrome, though caution is advised for certain individuals, particularly those with a history of GBS.[5][6]

-- Wikipedia:

This year vaccine makers are immunized from lawsuits

Lessons of 1976 outbreak prompt early action to ward off lawsuits
ATLANTA - The last time the government embarked on a major vaccine campaign against a new swine flu, thousands filed claims contending they suffered side effects from the shots. This time, the government has already taken steps to head that off.

Vaccine makers and federal officials will be immune from lawsuits that result from any new swine flu vaccine, under a document signed by Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, government health officials said Friday.

-- AP via MSNBC, July 20, 2009

60 Minutes
1979

CBS '60 Minutes' Transcript (thanks to Global Research)

Government Propaganda in Swine Flu Scare Causes Many Deaths

Below is the full transcript of the 1979 broadcast from the CBS investigative news program 60 Minutes on government propaganda around the 1976 swine flu scare.The program was aired on Sunday, November 4, 1979.

Only one person was killed by the actual flu, while hundreds filed claims of death of their loved ones from the massive vaccine campaign which was mounted. Key sections are highlighted in bold. To watch this video clip online, click here. For more reliable reasons not to trust the government when it tells you to take a vaccine, click here and here.

The Swine Flu Epidemic of 1976 inspired the vaccination of 40 Million people a little known fact was that those vaccinations caused devastating side effects to over 4000 victims. The frightening revelations about this event are the similarities with today.

Watch this video download it shows it to your friends and family. WE paid for these vaccines through our tax dollars. We must hold them accountable.

Swine Flu 1976

MIKE WALLACE: The flu season is upon us. Which type will we worry about this year, and what kind of shots will we be told to take? Remember the swine flu scare of 1976? That was the year the U.S. government told us all that swine flu could turn out to be a killer that could spread across the nation, and Washington decided that every man, woman and child in the nation should get a shot to prevent a nation-wide outbreak, a pandemic.

Well 46 million of us obediently took the shot, and now 4,000 Americans are claiming damages from Uncle Sam amounting to three and a half billion dollars because of what happened when they took that shot. By far the greatest number of the claims - two thirds of them are for neurological damage, or even death, allegedly triggered by the flu shot.

We pick up the story back in 1976, when the threat posed by the swine flu virus seemed very real indeed.

PRESIDENT GERALD FORD; This virus was the cause of a pandemic in 1918 and 1919 that resulted in over half a million deaths in the United States, as well as 20 million deaths around the world.

WALLACE: Thus the U.S. government's publicity machine was cranked into action to urge all America to protect itself against the swine flu menace. (Excerpt from TV commercial urging everyone to get a swine flu shot.) One of those who did roll up her sleeve was Judy Roberts. She was perfectly healthy, an active woman, when, in November of 1976, she took her shot. Two weeks later, she says, she began to feel a numbness starting up her legs.

JUDY ROBERTS: And I joked about it at that time. I said I'll be numb to the knees by Friday if this keeps up. By the following week, I was totally paralyzed.

WALLACE: So completely paralyzed, in fact, that they had to operate on her to enable her to breathe. And for six months, Judy Roberts was a quadriplegic. The diagnosis: A neurological disorder called "Guillain-Barre Syndrome" - GBS for short. These neurological diseases are little understood. They affect people in different ways.

As you can see in these home movies taken by a friend, Judy Roberts' paralysis confined her mostly to a wheelchair for over a year. But this disease can even kill. Indeed, there are 300 claims now pending from the families of GBS victims who died, allegedly as a result of the swine flu shot. In other GBS victims, the crippling effects diminish and all but disappear. But for Judy Roberts, progress back to good health has been painful and partial.

Now, I notice that your smile, Judy, is a little bit constricted.

ROBERTS: Yes, it is.

WALLACE: Is it different from what it used to be?

ROBERTS: Very different, I have a – a greatly decreased mobility in my lips. And I can't drink through a straw on the right-band side. I can't blow out birthday candles. I don't whistle any more, for which my husband is grateful.

WALLACE: It may be a little difficult for you to answer this question, but have you recovered as much as you are going to recover?

ROBERTS: Yes. This - this is it.

WALLACE: So you will now have a legacy of braces on your legs for the rest of your life?

ROBERTS: Yes. The weakness in my hands will stay and the leg braces will stay.

WALLACE: So Judy Roberts and her husband have filed a claim against the U.S. government. They're asking $12 million, though they don't expect to get nearly that much. Judy, why did you take the flu shot?

ROBERTS: I'd never taken any other flu shots, but I felt like this was going to be a major epidemic, and the only way to prevent a major epidemic of a - a really deadly variety of flu was for every body to be immunized.

WALLACE: Where did this so called "deadly variety of flu", where did it first hit back in 1976? It began right here at Fort Dix in New Jersey in January of that year, when a number of recruits began to complain of respiratory ailments, something like the common cold. An Army doctor here sent samples of their throat cultures to the New Jersey Public Health Lab to find our just what kind of bug was going around here. One of those samples was from a Private David Lewis, who had left his sick bed to go on a forced march. Private Lewis had collapsed on that march, and his sergeant had revived him by mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. But the sergeant showed no signs of illness. A few days later, Private Lewis died.

ROBERTS: If this disease is so potentially fatal that it's going to kill a young, healthy man, a middle-aged schoolteacher doesn't have a prayer.

WALLACE: The New Jersey lab identified most of those solders' throat cultures as the normal kind of flu virus going around that year, but they could not make out what kind of virus was in the culture from the dead soldier, and from four others who were sick. So they sent those cultures to the Federal Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, for further study. A few days later they got the verdict: swine flu. But that much-publicized outbreak of swine flu at Fort Dix involved only Private Lewis, who died, and those four other soldiers, who recovered completely without the swine flu shot.

ROBERTS: If I had known at that time that the boy had been in a sick bed, got up, went out on a forced march and then collapsed and died, I would never have taken the shot.

DR DAVID SENCER: The rationale for our recommendation was not on the basis of the death of a - a single individual, but it was on the basis that when we do see a change in the characteristics of the influenza virus, it is a massive public-health problem in the country.

WALLACE: Dr David Sencer, then head of the CDS - the Center of Disease Control in Atlanta - is now in private industry. He devised the swine flu program and he pushed it.

WALLACE: You began to give flu shots to the American people in October of '76?

DR SENCER: October 1st.

WALLACE: By that time, how many cases of swine flu around the world had been reported?

DR SENCER: There had been several reported, but none confirmed. There had been cases in Australia that were reported by the press, by the news media. There were cases in -

WALLACE: None confirmed? Did you ever uncover any other outbreaks of swine flu anywhere in the world?

DR SENCER: No

WALLACE: Now, nearly everyone was to receive a shot in a public health facility where a doctor might not be present, therefore it was up to the CDC to come up with some kind of official consent form giving the public all the information it needed about the swine flu shot. This form stated that the swine flu vaccine had been tested. What it didn't say was that after those tests were completed, the scientists developed another vaccine and that it was the one given to most of the 46 million who took the shot. That vaccine was called "X-53a". Was X-53a ever field tested?

DR SENCER: I-I can't say. I would have to -

WALLACE: It wasn't

DR SENCER: I don't know

WALLACE: Well, I would think that you're in charge of the program

DR SENCER: 1 would have to check the records. I haven't looked at this in some time.

WALLACE: The information form the consent form was also supposed to warn people about any risk of serious complications following the shot. But did it?

ROBERTS: No, I had never heard of any reactions other than a sore arm, fever, this sort of thing.

WALLACE: Judy Roberts' husband, Gene, also took the shot.

GENE ROBERTS: Yes, I looked at that document, I signed it. Nothing on there said I was going to have a heart attack, or I can get Guillain Barre, which I'd never heard of.

WALLACE: What if people from the government, from the Center for Disease Control, what if they had indeed, known about it, what would be your feeling?

JUDY ROBERTS: They should have told us.

WALLACE: Did anyone ever come to you and say, "You know something, fellows, there's the possibility of neurological damage if you get into a mass immunization program?"

DR SENCER: No

WALLACE: No one ever did?

DR SENCER: No

WALLACE: Do you know Michael Hattwick?

DR SENCER: Yes, uh-hmm.

WALLACE: Dr Michael Hattwick directed the surveillance team for the swine flu program at the CDC. His job was to find out what possible complications could arise from taking the shot and to report his findings to those in charge. Did you know ahead of time, Dr Hattwick that there had been case reports of neurological disorders, neurological illness, apparently associated with the injection of influenza vaccine?

DR MICHAEL HATTWICK: Absolutely

WALLACE: You did?

DR HATIWICK: Yes

WALLACE: How did you know that?

DR Hattwick: By review of the literature.

WALLACE: So you told your superiors - the men in charge of the swine flu immunization program - about the possibility of neurological disorders?

DR RATTWICK: Absolutely

WALLACE: What would you say if I told you that your superiors say that you never told them about the possibility of neurological complications?

DR HAJTWICK: That's nonsense. I can't believe that they would say that they did not know that there were neurological illnesses associated with influenza vaccination. That simply is not true. We did know that.

DR SENCER: I have said that Dr Hattwick had never told me of his feelings on this subject.

WALLACE: Then he's lying?

DR SENCER: I guess you would have to make that assumption.

WALLACE: Then why does this report from your own agency, dated July 1976, list neurological complications as a possibility?

DR SENCER: I think the consensus of the scientific community was that the evidence relating neurologic disorders to influenza immunization was such that they did not feel that this association was a real one.

WALLACE: You didn't feel it was necessary to tell the American people that information

DR SENCER: I think that over the - the years we have tried to inform the American people as - as fully as possible.

WALLACE: As part of informing Americans about the swine flu threat, Dr Sencer's CDC also helped create the advertising to get the public to take the shot. Let me read to your from one of your own agency's memos planning the campaign to urge Americans to take the shot. "The swine flu vaccine has been taken by many important persons," he wrote. "Example: President Ford, Henry Kissinger, Elton John, Muhammad Ah, Mary Tyler Moore, Rudolf Nureyev, Walter Cronkite, Ralph Nader, Edward Kennedy" -etcetera, etcetera, True?

DR SENCER: I'm not familiar with that particular piece of paper, but I do know that, at least of that group, President Ford did take the vaccination.

WALLACE: Did you talk to these people beforehand to find out if they planned to take the shot?

DR SENCER: I did not, no.

WALLACE: Did anybody?

DR SENC ER: I do not know.

WALLACE: Did you get permission to use their names in your campaign?

DR SENCER: I do not know.

WALLACE: Mary, did you take a swine flu shot?

MARY TYLER MOORE: No, I did not.

WALLACE: Did you give them permission to use your name saying that you had or were going to?

MOORE: Absolutely not. Never did.

WALLACE: Did you ask your own doctor about taking the swine flu shot?

MOORE: Yes, and at the time he thought it might be a good idea. But I resisted it, because I was leery of having the symptoms that sometimes go with that kind of inoculation.

WALLACE: So you didn't?

MOORE: No, I didn't.

WALLACE: Have you spoken to your doctor since?

MOORE: Yes.

WALLACE: And?

MOORE: He's delighted that I didn't take that shot.

WALLACE: You're in charge. Somebody's in charge.

DR SENCER: There are -

WALLACE: This is your advertising strategy that I have a copy of here.

DR SENCER: Who's it signed by?

WALLACE: This one is unsigned. But you--you'll acknowledge that it was your baby so to speak?

DR SENCER: It could have been from the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. It could be from CDC. I don't know. I'll be happy to take responsibility for it.

WALLACE: It's been three years now since you fell ill by GBS right?

ROBERTS: Right.

WALLACE: Has the federal government, in your estimation, played fair with you about your claim?

ROBERTS: No, I don't think so. It seems to be dragging on and on and on, and really no end in sight that I can see at this point.

JOSEPH CALIFANO: With respect to the cases of Guillain Barre...

WALLACE: Former Secretary of HEW Joseph Caifano, too was disturbed that there was no end in sight. So a year and a half ago, he proposed that Uncle Sam would cut the bureaucratic red tape for victims suffering from GBS and would pay up quickly.

CALIFANO: We shouldn't hold them to an impossible or too difficult standard of proving that they were hurt. Even if we pay a few people a few thousand dollars that might not have deserved it, I think justice requires that we promptly pay those people who do deserve it.

WALLACE: Who's making the decision to be so hard-nosed about settling?

CALIFANO: Well, I assume the Justice Department is.

WALLACE: Griffin Bell, before he left?

CALIFANO: Well, the Justice Department agreed to the statement I made. It was cleared word for word with the lawyers in the Justice Department by my HEW lawyers.

CALIFANO: That-that statement said that we should pay Guillain Barre claims without regard to whether the federal government was negligent, if they - if they resulted from the swine flu shot.

GENE ROBERTS: I think the government knows its wrong.

JUDY ROBERTS: If it drags out long enough, that people will just give up, let it go.

GENE ROBERTS: I—I am a little more adamant in my thoughts than my wife is, because I asked - told Judy to take the shot. She wasn't going to take it, and she never had had shots. And I'm mad with my government because they knew the fact, but they didn't realize those facts because they - if they had released them, the people wouldn't have taken it. And they can come out tomorrow and tell me there's going to be an epidemic, and they can drop off like flies to - next to me, I will not take another shot that my government tells me to take.

WALLACE: Meantime, Judy Roberts and some 4,000 others like her are still waiting for their day in court.

Homeland Security To Quarantine Swine Flu Carriers

Edger — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 09:46:54 -0500

Homeland Security is preparing to quarantine people with confirmed swine flu infections, according to a newly released memo obtained by CBS News.

[The memo] says: "The Department of Justice has established legal federal authorities pertaining to the implementation of a quarantine and enforcement. Under approval from HHS, the Surgeon General has the authority to issue quarantines."

Federal quarantine authority is limited to diseases listed in presidential executive orders; President Bush added "novel" forms of influenza with the potential to create pandemics in Executive Order 13375. Anyone violating a quarantine order can be punished by a $250,000 fine and a one-year prison term.

In 2005, the Bush administration prepared guidelines similar to what's currently being circulated by DHS.

In the National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza (PDF link), it outlined "public health guidance" that includes barring people from social gatherings and travel.

As of this writing, there are no confirmed deaths linked directly to swine flu, though U.S. officials believe it only a matter of time.

In the mean-time, this is not something to get panicked over. Even the Centers for Disease Control has stopped short of issuing travel restrictions and said that border closures -- the likes of which were enforced during the SARS outbreak -- are not necessary.

Finally, and this one's a little dose of reality, over 13,000 Americans have died just this year from the "regular" flu and complications thereof.

-- RawStory