Thursday
May072009
Congress Protects Pork
Coffee Brown, MD, University of New Mexico, Talk Radio News
Please don’t call it “swine flu” anymore.
That was the main message at the Senate Appropriations Committee Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration and Related Agencies Subcommittee hearing on the 2009 H1N1 virus.
Witnesses, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, acting Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, answered
questions from Sens. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.), Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), Robert Bennett (R-Utah) and Mark Pryor (D-Ariz.) about the commercially regrettable naming of the 2009 H1N1 virus and about vaccines.
Vilsack said the USDA has been aggressively campaigning with trading partners to protect pork’s image as a safe food, but China and Russia
have suspended purchases of American pork. Prices have fallen about 20 percent, he said, versus about 45 percent during the 1976 swine flu
scare.
Brownback asked whether there should be more surveillance of animals, since several recent infections have been zoonotic, or transmitted from
animals to humans. Vilsack said that such surveillance is ongoing but that funding has been flat. He stressed that while the last round of bird flu was from birds to humans, this flu has so far only gone from humans to animals. “We should really be calling this the human flu,” he said.
Kohl wanted to know if vaccines would be ready for a possible reoccurrence of the current atypical flu in the fall, and mentioned previous estimates at similar hearings of four to six months to prepare such a vaccine. Sharfstein responded by emphasizing the uncertainties: time to develop the vaccine, time to test it, and the final decision whether full production was merited. He said that full production would not significantly reduce production of the usual seasonal vaccine, as that version will have almost finished the year’s order by the time a decision has to be made.
Kohl asked Sharfstein whether this strain would prove to be dangerous, and Sharfstein replied that it doesn’t look bad now, but viruses mutate, so he couldn’t make predictions about future behavior.
Please don’t call it “swine flu” anymore.
That was the main message at the Senate Appropriations Committee Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration and Related Agencies Subcommittee hearing on the 2009 H1N1 virus.
Witnesses, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, acting Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, answered
questions from Sens. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.), Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), Robert Bennett (R-Utah) and Mark Pryor (D-Ariz.) about the commercially regrettable naming of the 2009 H1N1 virus and about vaccines.
Vilsack said the USDA has been aggressively campaigning with trading partners to protect pork’s image as a safe food, but China and Russia
have suspended purchases of American pork. Prices have fallen about 20 percent, he said, versus about 45 percent during the 1976 swine flu
scare.
Brownback asked whether there should be more surveillance of animals, since several recent infections have been zoonotic, or transmitted from
animals to humans. Vilsack said that such surveillance is ongoing but that funding has been flat. He stressed that while the last round of bird flu was from birds to humans, this flu has so far only gone from humans to animals. “We should really be calling this the human flu,” he said.
Kohl wanted to know if vaccines would be ready for a possible reoccurrence of the current atypical flu in the fall, and mentioned previous estimates at similar hearings of four to six months to prepare such a vaccine. Sharfstein responded by emphasizing the uncertainties: time to develop the vaccine, time to test it, and the final decision whether full production was merited. He said that full production would not significantly reduce production of the usual seasonal vaccine, as that version will have almost finished the year’s order by the time a decision has to be made.
Kohl asked Sharfstein whether this strain would prove to be dangerous, and Sharfstein replied that it doesn’t look bad now, but viruses mutate, so he couldn’t make predictions about future behavior.
Republicans Propose Putting GM Into The Hands Of Public
Republican Senators Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), Jon Kyl (Ariz.), and Robert Bennett (Utah) held a press conference today to introduce the “Auto Stock for Every Taxpayer Act”. The legislation will require the Treasury Department to distribute stock in the newly restructured companies to individual taxpayers within one year of the GM bankruptcy proceedings.
“This is the best way to get the auto companies out of the hands of Washington bureaucrats and politicians, and into the hands of the American people and the marketplace where it belongs,” Alexander said in his opening statements.
Sen. Robert Bennett (R-Utah) added two amendments to Alexander’s bill. The first amendment will give the Secretary of the Treasury the same fiduciary responsibilities that any director of a company would have. The second, being that no additional money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) would be distributed to bankrupt companies.
TARP is a program that was enacted in 2008, originally, to address the credit crisis. Recently, funds from this program have been used to help banks like Bank of America.
Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) said, “I am proud to be a co-sponsor of the Alexander-Bennett amendment because they joined two excellent ideas together in something that I think is critical.”
Alhough Kyl didn’t add any additional terms to the bill, he spoke for the American people, saying, “They are fed up with the government taking over those businesses and running those businesses.”
Kyl explained that if the government were to hold the 60% of stock that it needs to own the company, it would result in a loss. He claimed that there would be an opposite result if the taxpaying public were to own the stock instead.
When asked about tomorrow’s announcement of the Unemployment Rate, Sen. Bennett said, “I can’t forecast what we are going to see tomorrow... One of the things we have learned, is that artificial attempts to maintain employment that go against market forces prolong recessions and sometimes turn them into depressions.”