Flu vaccine:
Hostage to the "standards" of profitability

Oct 25, 2004

There's now an extreme shortage of flu vaccine. It's a foregone conclusion that several thousand vulnerable people will die this winter from influenza that a vaccination could have stopped.

When citizens raised the question of getting extra vaccine from Canada, which has no shortage, the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services said that it was out of the question because Canada's vaccine hadn't passed U.S. standards.

What standards? Perhaps the standards of restricting access to needed goods and services, until mountains of private profit can be made?