Another slow month

December was another very quiet month on the flu front. And as I’ve said before, that is a very good thing.

A slow month. And that is GOOD!

It has been a slow news month on the Flu-in-North-Denver front. And that is very good. Just as I had hoped for three months ago.

In my circles, which include hundreds of people, I’m not aware of any H1N1 swine flu, or any serious flus. I am happy for that result to this point in the flu season, even though I lament the hard times that some across the world are having with flus this year. I am just happy that, to date, any pandemic has been avoided.

Policy Decisions Slow H1N1 Vaccine Production

Why is H1N1 influenza vaccine coming out so slowly in the United States? Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former FDA deputy commissioner, says a few policy decisions slow the production of vaccine.

Why do adjuvants matter? An adjuvanted H1N1 vaccine being used in Europe contains 3.75 micrograms of vaccine stock. The same vaccine in the U.S., without the adjuvant, requires 15 micrograms of vaccine for equal potency. If we used adjuvants, we could have had four times the number of shots with the same raw material.

Our regulators are more risk-averse. If a much more lethal pandemic flu strain popped up would the regulators continue to be so conservative?

That’s Randall Parker. Read the whole thing.

And no, they likely would decrease risk aversion as the crises deepens. But governments generally respond to crises after the horse is already out of the barn. And they neglect the effect that government overregulation has had on the insufficient production of a vaccine (or really, any good) in the first place.

I wish it was not so, but if H1N1 swine flu happens to take off this year, which I hope it does not but no man knows, there will be a lot of casualties due to government action (or as seen ex post, mal-action)

Why You Can’t Get the Swine Flu Vaccine

Scott Gottlieb says:

Though the swine flu is widespread in 46 states many Americans are still waiting to get their vaccines. The Obama administration blames the shortage on manufacturing delays at the five firms making these products. But production issues only explain part of the shortfall. Also to blame are a series of policy decisions that reflect our extreme caution when it comes to these products.

From a regulatory standpoint, vaccines are unique in many ways. Since we distribute them widely to otherwise healthy people, they deserve careful oversight. But right now we are shunning new, superior vaccine science by being overly cautious.

Read the whole thing.

In my view, we are not merely being overly cautious, although that is a major shortcoming of the standard FDA drug approval process. We are failing to let markets “provide the goods.” We’ve decided that any profits that would be made by vaccine manufacturers are evil, “feeding off the backs of the needy”, and so on. Thus the ordinary incentives of the market where the company that produces large amounts of vaccine, ready to be used in a “bad” year, would allow them to make super-ordinary profits, are not present. Private firms are reduced to doing fixed-price and fixed-quantity vaccine production for a monopoly vaccine supplier, the US government.

Why are we surprised when vaccines are in short supply?

Did the Soviet Union regularly supply the amount of bread and potatoes that the Soviet consumer wanted?

All quiet on the northern front

At least it is among my circle of friends and acquaintances. Nothing out of the ordinary for a mid-October in north Denver.

I do note however that the “CDC says this year’s flu season is ‘very sobering’”

Privacy statement for Flu in North Denver blog

The growth of digitally intermediated communications and huge, low-cost data stores have raised a variety of privacy issues. Daniel Solove has made one of the most comprehensive and useful contributions to evolving thought in this field; if you have further interest, I highly recommned reading any of his writing on the subject.

It therefore seems prudent to explicitly state that the intent of this blog is to produce digitally intermediated communication of flu data in order to facilitate both “planned” and “spontaneous” ordering of that data. Daniel Klein calls this a process of “mutual and concatenate coordination.” Such unplanned (concatenate) coordination of data in flu data feeds will happen, whether intended or not. Thus, this privacy statement.

PRIVACY STATEMENT
All names of individuals and organizations which are mentioned on this blog, which could in any way be used to help identify any persons described, will be changed to protect the privacy of the persons discussed. Organization names may or may not be pseudonymized, as the occasion warrants. The blog owner and authors will not reveal any personal information to state authorities except by lawful order of a court which shall have jurisdiction in such matters. The blog owner and authors will not reveal privacy-related information in any other media, except by court order.

LICENSE STATEMENT
All data on this blog is explicitly licensed under the standard “attibution-type” Creative Commons license; to wit:
“Attribution (by): Licensees may copy, distribute, display and perform the work and make derivative works based on it only if they give the author or licensor a mention of blog name, blogger screen-name, and date of post (or inclusive dates of posts) used in the derivative work.” That’s all. Simple.

Why is there a vaccine shortage?

I blogged yesterday about swine flu vaccinations; i.e., vaccinations with the new vaccine for the H1N1 flu virus.

Today I learn that there is a vaccine shortage. I didn’t know that. But then why wouldn’t there be when vaccine procurement and distribution has become politicized rather than being left to the market. Russ Roberts explains it here, and notes that many rational people let their distrust of “companies” get in the way of better policy outcomes that would ensure we had plenty of vaccine for everyone who wanted it: allow vaccine-producing companies to sell vaccines as a normal economic good.

I’m with Russ. I understand and accept the strongly held beliefs of many who inhabit human society with me. But I do not condone their well-intentioned but, ultimately, selfish behavior that ensures we will have vaccine shortages in the infrequent years that a vaccine is most needed.

Concern over H1N1 Vaccine Dangers

I’m not a medical technologist, so have no qualifications to weigh in on the veracity or usefulness of this information.

Still, the claim is that the new H1N1 flu vaccine has been “severely fast tracked” through the ordinary testing process. Here’s the link. This is certainly information worth considering for those of you open to this option.

I report. You decide.

(Full disclosure: I have never accepted one of the flu vaccination shots that are hyped each year about this time, even when they have been offered to me for free.)

Case no. 1?

First fluish symptoms I’ve learned of among my acquaintences. In keeping with my previously-stated purpose, I’ll mention it here:

Male, mid-50s, zip code 80234.
Symptoms started approx. 6 Sep, felt better 12 Sep. Included aches, pains, esp. lower back pain. Pt. self-treated, at home, outside the formal medical system.

Hyperlocal hypernarrow blogging

As you can see in our tag line, this blog is about “medical communication from the bottom-up.” This idea is inspired by several things, including my own previous scholarly work on the disintermediation of the news industry by low-cost ubiquitous digital technology.

Matt at Hyperlocalblogger get’s it! Blogging from the bottom up is better: local bloggers care more, and they know more. I started this venture with a strong understanding of the idea of Hayek and other Austrian economists of the critical importance of distributed, subjective knowledge. And good on Matt for reminding me of the critical importance of motivation when reporting on hyperlocal news.

For us, on this blog, the subject is not merely hyperlocal news in general, but rather the much more hypernarrow topic: the flu, in the winter of 2009-2010. Indeed, motivation and distributed knowledge will be key.