Structural Contradictions - The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu - page 63

work, to distribute vaccines, or to track outbreaks. Although “most public health officials call the emer-
gence of a new lethal strain of the flu 'an inevitability,' ” only thirteen states had pandemic plans that met
federal guidelines, while twenty states had failed to generate any plan. Earlier in February 2004, the Trust
had warned that “pandemic flu could be much more demanding on state and local health resources and
much more damaging to the general population than a bioterrorism attack.” It predicted that a pandemic
would “cripple the resources of a U.S. public health system already stretched too thin.” 281
In short, as Nature pointed out, “Three years of heightened concern about bioterrorism have done
nothing to address the fundamental weakness of the U.S. public health system.” 282 Except for those lucky
few—mainly doctors and soldiers—who might receive prophylactic treatment with Tamiflu, the Bush ad-
ministration had left most Americans as vulnerable to the onslaught of a new flu pandemic as their grand-
parents or great-grandparents had been in 1918. Pandemic planners admitted that the bulk of the public,
initially at least, would simply have to cower in their homes. In a presidential election season dominated
by “national security,” pandemic vulnerability should have been a decisive wedge issue; however, the
Kerry campaign scolded Bush for the vaccine debacle and promised to stabilize future production with
government purchases of unused stocks, but otherwise offered few substantive ideas for repairing Amer-
ica's collapsing public-health infrastructure. 283 Kerry, in fact, let Bush off the hook, never once mention-
ing the avian influenza threat in any of the three presidential debates.
The only presidential candidate to pay attention to the monster at the door was Ralph Nader, the can-
didate whose presence in the campaign was so reviled by “progressive” born-again Democrats. In Febru-
ary 2004 Nader contrasted the administration's obsession with Iraq's nonexistent “weapons of mass de-
struction” with its failure to energetically address avian flu in Asia. “The chain of infections from do-
mesticated Chinese ducks to pigs to humans,” he forewarned in colorful prose, “can explode into a world
war of mutant viruses taking millions of casualties before vaccines can be developed and deployed.” Six
months later he wrote a public letter to Bush impeaching the administration's failure to act upon the warn-
ings of top researchers and medical organizations. “Such notice apparently is not enough to move your
Presidency to action. These mutating viruses are not like human villains. You need to recognize that their
indiscriminate destruction of innocent civilians, however, can be considered a form of viral terrorism.” 284
In the WHO's “worst-case” scenario, 2 million of these “innocent civilians” threatened with death are
Americans, most of the remaining 98 million, however, live in the poor cities of the Third World.