Bush suddenly wakes up to threat of avian flu

By Thomas Oliphant in yesterday's Boston Globe:

If President Bush had been awake at the switch earlier this year -- instead of, for example, obsessing about Social Security privatization schemes -- the United States would probably not find itself near the end of an international line for influenza medicine. As it is, his sudden realization that the potential of a public health disaster looms has set of an unseemly governmental scramble that mostly misses the point.
Even now, the Bush response to repeated wakeup calls betrays a weird fixation on one of the less central questions that would be raised by the outbreak of a significant epidemic of avian flu -- whether the armed forces would have to be used to quarantine an invaded part of the country...
The drug in question is called Tamiflu, manufactured by the international drug giant, Roche. According to public health experts, it is a rare medicine with proven effectiveness in greatly reducing the severity of influenza symptoms and shortening the disease's duration. Generally, to work optimally, Tamiflu needs to be taken within a couple of days of infection.
When concerns about a possible pandemic emerged earlier this year, several governments responded vigorously. In Scandinavia and in Britain, France, Canada, Japan, and Switzerland, orders were placed with Roche designed to provide enough medicine to treat 20-40 percent of their populations.
According to US officials, there is enough Tamiflu around in this country to help at most 2 percent of the population.