It's a good thing that no one from modern Wall Street was on the Titanic when it slammed into the iceberg. As the freezing waters rose, the women and children would have had to line up behind the most well-connected firms in the country for a place in the lifeboats.
Nothing symbolizes the fiasco that has been the distribution of the H1N1 vaccine better than news that Wall Street firms like Citigroup and Goldman Sachs are receiving supplies of the vaccine before the rest of the public.
You don't have to be a populist to be disgusted by the news. One would have expected preferential treatment of the powerful and connected during the Bush years, but the fact that this is happening during President Barack Obama's watch is beyond galling.
How did we get to the point where Wall Street employers have access to a precious health commodity before ordinary citizens in at-risk groups -- or the general public?
In anticipation of a swine flu outbreak, the government ordered 250 million doses of the vaccine. Because of manufacturing delays and unrealistic promises by the pharmaceutical industry, only 32 million doses are available. More vaccines are entering the pipeline every day, but the shortage has created a larger-than-expected demand in all regions of the country.
For its part, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has designated children, young people under 24, pregnant women, caretakers for children under 6 months, those ages 25 to 64 with chronic health conditions and health-care workers as the most at-risk. The states are responsible for distributing the H1N1 vaccine to these at-risk citizens.
Every day on the news, long lines of Americans of all sorts wait for flu shots at clinics and malls. Some have waited all night. Others have sacrificed large chunks of their workday, only to be told that the allotted supplies have been exhausted. This is infuriating and an outrage.
New York health officials are letting businesses with onsite medical staff request supplies of the vaccine, but they must agree to give it only to employees in high-risk groups. We have to wonder how many thousands of pregnant women, infants or elderly are on the payrolls of Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, the Federal Reserve Bank, Time Inc., Columbia University and other big New York employers that have received the vaccine.
The government shouldn't have made it available to these employers ahead of the rest of the country in the first place.
The fact that the Obama administration has not been able to deliver the vaccine to all who want it -- in November already -- is a travesty. It shakes our confidence in the president's ability to succeed with a much larger government initiative -- the public option in health-care reform.
Posted
Nov 09 2009, 05:00 AM
by
Susan Mannella