Barbara Ehrenreich: The Swine Flu Vaccine Screw-up

I’m with Ian on the whole vaccine nonsense .. I think i said it before that this swine flu virus has the best publicist ever .. in any case, Ehrenreich’s got an interesting take in the whole mess…

As for Big Pharma, the truth is that they’re just not all that into vaccines, traditionally preferring to manufacture drugs for such plagues as erectile dysfunction, social anxiety, and restless leg syndrome. Vaccines can be tricky and less than maximally profitable to manufacture. They go out of style with every microbial mutation, and usually it’s the government, rather than cunning direct-to-consumer commercials, that determines who gets them. So it should have been no surprise that Big Pharma approached the H1N1 problem ploddingly, using a 50-year old technology involving the production of the virus in chicken eggs, a method long since abandoned by China and the European Union

– mab .. read more

 

 

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 8:15 AM and filed under Articles, Economics, Health, Politics, Science. Follow comments here with the RSS 2.0 feed. Skip to the end and leave a response. Trackbacks are closed.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.