Remember the Swine Flu Crisis?

Or Lessons In How Well Our Government Will Be Able to Run health Care

I completely forget about it until the WSJ ran a story today, The Flu Season That Fizzled.  While the article spoke of the lack of severity of the H1N1 flu this past flu season, it failed to comment on what should be the big story.  How could the experts be so wrong?  These government run or sponsored experts, who so badly handled Swine Flu, should be put in charge of our entire health care system?

Do you remember the hysteria? Pandemic! Large death toll!  Actually, the WHO and the CDC and everyone who has a budget that depends on the worst possible news, made H1N1 sound worse than they knew it to be.  The official predictions by health experts, very wrong as it turns out, of 90,000 deaths in the US is not much more than twice the normal number of fatalities from the flu each year.

BUT they were still miserably wrong.  Lose your job in the private sector wrong.  It has been a completely normal, perhaps even subnormal year in terms of deaths from flu. 

Now this season's "pandemic" was expected.  Last year when H1N1 reappeared,  the warning went out, and the announcement of a huge vaccine program was made.

Ahhhh, the vaccine.  Massive doses were being produced under government auspices.  And how did that work out?  Good thing the H1N1 was a bust or we'd have been it big trouble.  Rather than massive doses we had massive shortages.  By October, when the 40 million doses were supposed to be ready, less than 6 million doses were shipped.   Barely ten per cent? 

The predictions were very wrong.  Vaccine planning and production was criminally inept.  Do we really want these kinds of people in charge of our entire health care when they can't manage a small bit of it?