Corporate employers got scarce flu vaccine

[RamboLiberal]

Source: USA Today

When the swine flu vaccine was most scarce, health officials gave thousands of doses to corporate clinics at Walt Disney World, Toyota, defense contractors, oil companies and cruise lines, according to a USA TODAY review of vaccine distribution data from three states.

USA TODAY examined how state health departments distributed H1N1 vaccine after public outcry last month over Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs receiving doses while doctors and hospitals encountered shortages. The data show other companies got the vaccine in October and early November. In some cases, early doses went to people not deemed most at risk by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"Now we have evidence of what my suspicions were," said U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., chair of a House health subcommittee. "I'm afraid when you have these corporate initiatives, it's not primarily needs-based."

Pallone said he would send the CDC a letter Tuesday asking it to revise guidelines to states on the use of corporate health clinics.



Read more: http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-12-07-swine-flu-vaccine_N.htm

---

F'ing figures this would happen. All hail the corporate lords and to hell with the peasants.

[benfranklin1776]

1. Plutocracy is upon us

Government of the corporations by the corporations and for the corporations. We the people are left to fend for ourselves and beg for scraps from the overlords tables or in this case flu vaccine. Mr Pallone is absolutely correct when he says it is not "needs based" it is instead "greenback based."
Disgusting. I wonder how many people died due to lack of vaccine while these corporadoes were swimming in the stuff.

[Igel]

25. Toyota, Google tells me, has two things in San Antonio.

The first is a financial services office. They have over a dozen of them scattered around the country.

The second is a manufacturing plant.

Corporate HQ is elsewhere. Design is elsewhere. Pretty much everything--including the main financial services office--is elsewhere.

They have 35k employees total in the US, with 150k or so "indirect employees".

Now, I grew up near a large industrial company that had 35k at that single plant. When I got sick or needed glasses, we went to the company clinic. It was the first line of defense for keeping health-care costs down, sort of a home-grown HMO. This was in the 1960s. Believe me, you'd find very few "corporadoes"--unless you mean workers, whether in the offices or in production--at these clinics. It's one of the benefits that we seem to demand for workers but, when they get them, we intensely resent because when we say "benefits for workers" we each really mean "benefits for *us*--screw the other guy if we're not included."

In fact, you didn't find a lot of "corporadoes" at this plant. There was a chief, but he reported to a vice-president, and there were perhaps half a dozen under that chief responsible for procurement, quality control, and other things. But by then you were down four layers from the CEO. At layer 5 there were a couple score employees--you got things like "senior purchaser" and other 8-5/M-F workers (hey, I had an aunt that did that!). At 6 layers down you got floor foreman (oops, my father, who worked shift work), with well over a hundred, I'd guess. 7 layers down got you all the rest of the workers, 34k and more.

The San Antonio Toyota plant, we're told, got 2k doses. It probably employs 5-6k people at most, as a guess (the word "probably" says as much, of course). Not all, or even most, of them are "corporadoes." Again, unless you think that assembly-line workers, bookkeepers, shipping crews and the like are "corporadoes."

[MichiganVote]

2. This is so positively predictable. What price "freedom"---death.

[sasquatch]

3. Of course, they're the elect of the invisible hand God so they deserve favoratism

[New Dawn]

4. The richest 10% completely control the US.

[RealityBasedMN]

5. Hello?

I'm one of the ones that received the vaccine through the corporate program. Frankly, a little common sense might be needed here as there are 2,000+ people that work in that building. If one person were to come to work with H1N1 it could easily spread throughout the city as a result. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and vaccinating concentrations of people make sense in keeping it from spreading. Just a thought that it might not be the "conspiracy" some are so quick to jump on.

[Raster]

6. Hello? So what makes your need, or your employers need greater?

I'm diabetic and considered high risk. I can't get it. I guess if I go to work for your employer I have a better chance, eh?

Fail.

[Robb]

20. Why can't you get it?

I keep hearing this. If you are high risk, you should be able to get it. :shrug:

[Mojorabbit]

26. My husband got a hundred doses of swine flu vaccine

at the end of Nov and still is not able to get seasonal flu vaccine for his patients as it all went to walgreens and the like. This has not ever happened before. Lots of complaining family practice docs here.

[Igel]

22. Then you'd have been really incensed a while back in Houston.

The problem is three fold.

1. Some people have pull and got the vaccine when they weren't supposed to.

2. Others were given the vaccine in spite of the fact that they weren't in the highest-risk groups; they were merely in a *sufficiently* high-risk group.

3. And, finally, in Houston in early November lots of people had the flu, clinics got the flu, and when they had given it to all those who qualified they still had a lot of flu vaccine. Perishable flu vaccine. The response was to include others who weren't otherwise at high enough risk to get it. The reasoning: Better it use it on lower risk groups than eventually dump it in the trash.

Try as I may, I can't read (1) into this article. It's the inference a lot of people want to draw, desperately want to draw because it confirms their biases, but I can't find the evidence.

I can read (2) into this article because it says those "those not deemed most at risk." Well, depending how you read that there might be just a single category of people "most at risk" or there could be a group of categories. The usual interpretation is "group of categories"; but this is newspaper speak, where "usual interpretation" is just a tool used to manipulate the reader, when unusual interpretations are a given, and to browbeat the reader when s/he's suspicious.

The last paragraph points neatly to (3) as the culprit. Demand was lower than expected, given the demographics of the group served by the clinic. Well, I guess it was those politically powerful and wealthy poor in Houston and their special political pull that made the Houston clinic expand coverage--exactly parallel to the Toyota case. (Let's also keep in mind that all Toyota employees are wealthy and politically connected--even the janitors.)

My take: A bureaucracy took the information it had and then made decisions. They assumed that they could more accurately aggregate the information and more accurately disburse the vaccine than any other available process could. They're fallible, even if they're not corrupt, whatever they may think and what they may have convinced us to think.

[waterscalm]

8. Your "logic" fails!! One person walks into a crowded mall and

the same could happen.

[Xithras]

21. The two locations most likely to cause trans-familial spread are your workplace...

...and your childs school.

If you innoculate schoolkids and innoculate adults at their workplaces, you can choke the spread of any disease.

Your mall analogy fails because you typically only have very limited contact with other people at the mall, for short periods of time. In the workplace, you have close contact with a large number of people for extended periods of time. You also have a greater percentage of people using shared facilities in the workplace (bathrooms, breakrooms, etc) than you have in a shopping mall.

It's just common sense. When you're dealing with a contaigous disease, the best way to stop it is to immunize the people most likely to cause its spread...even if that means less is available for individuals who might suffer more severe health consequences if they catch it. By reducing the spread of the disease in the first place, you also reduce the risk that these sensitive groups will catch it.

[Le Taz Hot]

23. And I waited in line for 4 hours

in the cold and wet to get the H1N1 but the weather finally got to my asthma and I had to leave. Without the vaccine. The priority SHOULD have been municipalities.

[RamboLiberal]

24. Problem was corporate was getting it before the most at risk

and those in critical health care jobs. I'd have no problem with corporations getting the vaccine if the at-risk groups and those in health care fields most likely to encounter H1N1 patients had been given access.

In my area we had health care workers who hadn't gotten the vaccine and we had high risk people who couldn't get it.

My company sent an email saying if you're sick with flu symptoms - stay home and if you do come to work you will be sent home. We still don't have vaccine here for the general population. BTW, in my small company if everyone went down with H1N1 and your furnace happened to need a part in our area - you may be SOL since we're the wholesaler for the entire Western half of my state.

So tell me why your business is more important than our employees in a small 60 employee workplace?

[waterscalm]

7. "too big to fail"

[kpete]

9. Corporate employers got scarce flu vaccine

Source: USA Today

Corporate employers got scarce flu vaccine

By Alison Young, USA TODAY

When the swine flu vaccine was most scarce, health officials gave thousands of doses to corporate clinics at Walt Disney World, Toyota, defense contractors, oil companies and cruise lines, according to a USA TODAY review of vaccine distribution data from three states.

USA TODAY examined how state health departments distributed H1N1 vaccine after public outcry last month over Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs receiving doses while doctors and hospitals encountered shortages. The data show other companies got the vaccine in October and early November. In some cases, early doses went to people not deemed most at risk by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"Now we have evidence of what my suspicions were," said U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., chair of a House health subcommittee. "I'm afraid when you have these corporate initiatives, it's not primarily needs-based."

Pallone said he would send the CDC a letter Tuesday asking it to revise guidelines to states on the use of corporate health clinics.

Read more: http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-12-07-swine-flu-vaccine_N.htm

[marshall]

10. We are getting a limited supply this week

But it's restricted to people age six months to 24 years old and pregnant women. If you're over 24 but under 60 and have a chronic illness you MAY get the vaccine. If you're over 60 there's none for you.

[No Elephants]

14. Why is there none for those over 60 with chronic illness (or compromised immune systems)? Is it bc

so few over 60 are getting this flu, even if their immune systems are compromised?

[marshall]

17. The supply is limited

I'm glad that I will at least be able to get a vaccine for my son.

[Alcibiades]

19. For some reason, swine flu seems to afflict young people

H1N1 seems to be a young person's disease, It may be that older people have some immunity from some flu strain that was active decades ago that has never infected the younger population. If H1N1 were like the seasonal flu, what you say is true--older folks would be more vulnerable. They are not.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30605623/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1233989/Swine-flu-jab-dilemma-Parents-pregnant-women-refuse-experts-insist-safe--whos-right.html

Here in North Carolina, it's widespread. My wife has no spleen, and even she cannot get the vaccine. There's simply none available, and she goes to UNC for all her medical care.

According to the Director of the Lee County Health department, “Anything you get that sounds or looks or walks or talks like the flu, it’s gonna be H1N1." Scary stuff.

http://sanfordherald.com/pages/full_story/push?article-Swine+flu+could+be+epidemic+in+January%20&id=5030672-Swine+flu+could+be+epidemic+in+January&instance=homesecondleft

[Captain Hilts]

11. Who knew 'first among equals' extended to corporate honchos. And the Toronto's NHL and NBA teams

got priority in Canada. I almost don't object to the teams getting it because of the travel and contact with a lot of folks. Still, it looks bad if medical personnel are not yet getting it.

[No Elephants]

12. Signs in Massachusetts General Hospital Thanksgiving weekend: We do NOT have flu vaccine.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Massachusetts General Hospital, it is just short of 200 years old and was the hospital on which the Dr. Kildare movies and TV series were based. Patients travel there from all over the world for treatment.

[dugaresa]

13. Two of the companies listed make perfect sense, Walt Disney World and Cruise Lines

these are companies that have a lot of "people facing" employees.

1. These folks come in contact with loads of people every day or work in closed quarters with a lot of folks (cruises).
2. They don't want to have an employee star as "Typhoid Mary" and be blamed as the one who spread the flu to potentially thousands of people.

[earcandle]

15. Gee I wonder if any got the bad batches with live virus in them? Or the ones with preservatives.

[Mojorabbit]

27. I think only Canada got the bad batch

and it is Europe that is using adjuvants. Last I heard the US was only using regular vaccine made safely in the way seasonal flu vaccine is. It may have changed though.

[itsrobert]

16. I know for a fact it isn't widely available to US Military personnel

You would think that people in charge of protecting us would be one of the first in line.

[HopeHoops]

18. Yeah, I can see where Toyota's corporate employees would be critical.

:sarcasm:

[yxa]

28. Disneyland Resort workers concerned about H1N1

Meanwhile, the H1N1 virus continues to be a major concern for workers around the country. Interesting that Disney is mentioned in this piece. It seems that Disneyland Resort hotel workers are concerned about contracting or spreading the H1N1 virus, and about company practices related to this issue. I just watched a short film on youtube which looks at this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbdQCHUH3IU

[Romulox]

29. Does somebody in the Obama admin have a hard on for Toyota, or what?

:eyes: