Maybe it’s a ‘faith-based’ approach

October 7, 2005

I’ll be the first to admit that I know next to nothing about the avian flu. I can only hope public health officials appreciate the risk and are taking all necessary steps to protect the public.

And while I’m confident that there are capable and qualified people working on this at the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Health and Human Services, I felt a little better before I saw The New Republic’s latest article on Bush’s “Hackocracy.”

TNR “scoured” the Bush administration to find the next Michael Brown (incompetent crony given critical governmental responsibilities). In all, the magazine found 15 bureaucrats whose qualifications are, shall we say, questionable.

The one that caught my attention, in light of all the avian-flu reports I’ve been seeing, is Stewart Simonson, Assistant Secretary for Public Health and Emergency Preparedness at HHS.

According to his official biography, Stewart Simonson is the Health and Human Services Department’s point man “on matters related to bioterrorism and other public health emergencies.” Hopefully, he has taken crash courses on smallpox and avian flu, because, prior to joining HHS in 2001, Simonson’s background was not in public health, but … public transit.

He’d previously been a top official at the delay-plagued, money-hemorrhaging passenger rail company Amtrak. Before that, he was an adviser to Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson, specializing in crime and prison policy. When Thompson became HHS secretary in 2001, he hired Simonson as a legal adviser and promoted him to his current post shortly before leaving the Department last year. Simonson’s biography boasts that he “supervised policy development for Project BioShield,” a program designed to speed the manufacture of crucial vaccines and antidotes. “That effort, however, has by most accounts bogged down and shown few results,” The Washington Post reported last month.

Matthew Yglesias asked, “I wonder if anyone inside the White House ever gave a moment’s thought to the idea that public-health jobs should go to people with public-health expertise.”

I think we know the answer to that one — and it won’t help anyone feel any safer.

Good lord, maybe it’s time to break out the plastic sheeting and duct tape……..again…….sigh.

  • hiring public health experts would make them more concerned about public heath than the political health experts currents in place.

  • “Scoured”?? Buh??

    Shit, Shrub nominated a Brownie for the fucking Supreme Court! It’s been all over the newspapers, radio, and TV! How much “scouring” do you really need to do?

  • Don’t worry about “avian flu”, the fox (News) is watching over the chickens.

  • I’m looking forward to the day when we’ll finally see “The Pharmaceutical Channel” on cable television…..then we can all be scared shitless 24/7

  • Yes, this is really scary stuff. And what has this Administration done to make any scary thing less scary? Nothing, that’s their life sustaining force, an American population scared out of their wits.

    That’s why I must resort to ridicule….and oddly enough, what were we talking about a year ago? A reprise:

    “Exposed: Operation Blessed Placebo”

    EWM – (Nov. 7, 2004) Federal health officials will announce this week that they have averted a pandemic by finding enough flu vaccine to inoculate the entire U.S. population. However, documents obtained exclusively by EWM show that half of the shots will actually contain Holy Water.

    “Operation Blessed Placebo,” is the brainchild of a special task force made up of officials from the FDA and the President’s Office of Faith-Based Initiatives. The plan calls for placing flu vaccine labels on millions of vials of Holy Water and distributing them to the unsuspecting public.

    The Bush Administration believes that the healing powers of the Holy Water will magnify the placebo effect of the shots and get the country through the crisis by Divine Intervention. Meanwhile, the public will be told that the vaccine shortage never existed and was the result of “fuzzy math…”
    full article

  • So, far Bush administrator done a very good job but this is some thing called ever lasting process, I think the same amount of consideration should be applicable for a long process.

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