Blog of Jeff

I was watching another Palin interview yesterday and it suddenly dawned on me why I dislike her. It’s not her partisan attacks on all things Obama, because there are plenty of partisan attack dogs on both sides that frame and spin every issue as “we’re right and they’re wrong.” It’s definitely not her family, because I pretty much think that all politicians have screwed up families. It kind of goes with the job. It’s not even that she sometimes seems completely uninterested in learning anything about anything. Bush shared that attribute and though I didn’t like his policies, I can’t really say I hate him. In fact, he’s still got a likability to him as a person.

No, what really, really bugs me about Palin is the complete lack of loyalty and respect to McCain and his staff. This woman was virtually unknown to most of the country when McCain picked her. Now, she’s famous, making money, and a national power in her party. She owes all of that to McCain taking a huge gamble on her. He could have played it safe, he could have picked someone more well known, but instead he picked her.

Even if she really does think his staff treated her badly and blew the election, the classy thing to do would still be to be publicly grateful for the incredible opportunity they gave her. I think that is one trait of Bush’s she would do well to emulate at least a little. He was loyal to a fault to those around him. In contrast, Palin seems ready to trashy anybody and everybody in order to make herself look good.

There are limits to how far anybody should go out of loyalty, but Palin’s disloyalty is really unbecoming. It is just tacky. Considering where she was two years ago and where she is today, just about every sentence out of her mouth should start with a thank you to Senator McCain. She’s just so negative about McCain, his staff, the media, Obama, and everyone around her. She’s now on top of the world. And she talks like she earned it in spite of all the people that helped her get there.

Congress actually proposed something useful today. CCN Story here.

It has zero chance of getting the two-thirds vote needed for a constitutional amendment but it the single best idea for fixing the US political system. Their proposals calls for a limit of 3 congressional terms and 2 senatorial terms. It was proposed by Senators DeMint, Hutchinson, Coburn, and Brownback.

Career politicians are a horrible cancer on democracy. It is absolutely impossible for anyone to live at that intersection of special interests, money, and power without becoming biased and indebted to all kinds of groups. And once a politician has name recognition and milks his committee memberships for special interest money, he is almost invincible because of the money needed to overcome those advantages. Twelve years is plenty of time for a person to serve honorably and then get the hell out before they become slaves to the system. And from the special interest perspective, buying a politician might not be nearly so attractive if the investment would only have so many years worth of return on investment. People like Dodd who have been on the insurance and financial lobby payrolls for years might not be worth millions of dollars in campaign contributions any more. We don’t need limits on the money in campaigns, we need limits on the people in them.

The political argument for not having term limits is that the politicians supposedly become better informed on the issues and gain valuable experience performing the political work needed to pass legislation. That’s right. They say that what we’re seeing right now in the health care legislative process is a bright shining example of highly skilled and knowledgeable professional politicians doing their thing. Just think about how much worse it could be if they didn’t know what they are doing. HA! Amateur politicians might actually write some lines of legislation without angling for a special interest contribution, committee memberships, partisan advantages, or worrying about their next re-election. They might actually write some legislation because they think it would be good for the country. That would kind of make the US like, oh, what’s the word? Oh yes, a DEMOCRACY!

The response to the H1N1 virus hasn’t been terrible, but I don’t think it has been reassuringly good either. Below are some links regarding H1N1 that go into my opinions on it. Mainly, I think it once again shows that Americans are self-absorbed and selfish with a lot of our policies and we won’t even stop and consider the impact of our policies on other countries. Even for ourselves, though, it doesn’t show much intelligence or competence.

· http://www.slate.com/id/2234342/ - This article summarizes a lot of h1n1 information.

· http://www.slate.com/id/2228700/ -This article summarizes the US decision not to use adjuvants (boosters) to cut in half the amount of vaccine we would need.

· http://abcnews.go.com/Health/SwineFluNews/story?id=8296948&page=1&cid=yahoo_pitchlist – ABC News article about the US not using adjuvants because of fear of vaccines.

· http://psychoanalystsopposewar.org/blog/2009/09/07/revere-swine-flu-adjuvant-essential-for-global-equity/ - Health blog that includes good adjuvant discussion and quotes from officials.

The way this plays out is more about World Health Organization decisions than by the US but the choices made by both fit together badly.

The World Health Organization recommended that production of season flu vaccines be completed in all major production facilities before shifting to H1N1 production, due to the set-up time that would be lost and have to be duplicated to switch back. That decision was made with awareness that H1N1 would peak sooner than seasonal flu, but they thought the timeline would still allow enough H1N1 vaccine to be in the world prior to peak. That decision is open to a lot of second guessing for several reasons.

The first reason was technological, in that it took longer to successfully implant and grow the virus in eggs than expected, eating into the available time window. It was a misjudgment to assume that the timeline of production of a brand new strain of flu vaccine would be exactly the same as previous strains. to The second reason was political. The WHO also recommended using booster agents, which would substantially reduce the amount of active ingredient needed for each dose. If the US had followed that piece of advice, there would now be more than double as many doses available right now. However, fear of vaccines in general and boosted flu vaccines in particular, led to the US choosing the path of least resistance and utilizing only unboosted vaccines. A third consideration is that most people have never been exposed to this H1N1 variant, meaning there is zero native resistance. However, many people have previously had the seasonal variant in circulation this year. Therefore, it would have been better to be late or have shortages on the seasonal flu vaccine, peaking probably in January, rather than the H1N1 flu, which is peaking now.

The anti-vaccine community thinks that any complications or deaths from vaccines are unacceptable. But they aren’t willing to accept the consequences of thousands, possibly millions of deaths from a planet that isn’t properly immunized. The Gates Foundation is one group has been very vocal in saying the US decision to not use boosted H1N1 flu vaccine will result in many people dying in the rest of the world that could have been saved with the use of boosted vaccines to reach a lot more people a lot faster. The other side effect is that because of delays in getting a substantial percentage of people immunized, the risk of the virus mutating into something worse will be increased.

Most likely, everyone will come out of the H1N1 scare thinking the response was good enough because H1N1 is not significantly more fatal than the regular seasonal flu. But if the disease had turned out to be as deadly as it first appeared in Mexico, this response would not have been good enough by a long shot. The next time a potentially deadly pandemic is discovered, the US (and the rest of the world) need to be able to move a lot faster and be willing to take more political risks or we could be looking at millions of fatalities.

In retrospect, it would have been better to shift some portion of the main five production facilities in the world immediately into H1N1 so that the obstacles to incubation could have been identified right away and some doses of both types would have been available to vulnerable populations and health care personnel before either peak hit. We also could have encouraged people to get H1N1 first, which makes much more sense. The US also needs to start some public awareness initiatives to explain that boosted vaccines are critical to being able to respond quickly to pandemics and start making boosted vaccines available at least as an option, possibly even a cheaper option to encourage it. If even just 10% of the population willingly chose boosted vaccines, it would still be a major benefit for everyone in the US and the rest of the world in stretching out limited supplies and reducing costs. Fear and ignorance are terrible reasons to condemn a lot of people in other countries to an avoidable death.

This is one of those public policy issues that won’t get much attention in this country and most people won’t ever really think about it. But it has major consequences on the rest of the world. In some ways, we are still the same country that handed Native Americans blankets infected with smallpox and thought we were doing them a favor. Part of what is frustrating is that this wasn’t even an intelligent public debate. The Health Department and CDC simply decided Americans are too ignorant, fearful, and uncaring about other people to even bother having a discussion. They may have been right, but that sure doesn’t sound like a policy decision based on hope, change, or better international relations, like those advocated by a certain candidate not so long ago.

This is a question that is in the periphery of a current school project and it doesn’t really fit right now but I want to blog it so I will remember it in the future. The question is whether past experiences with disasters might actually be more of a hindrance than a help during a new disaster. Research has shown that trust in a strong and experienced leader is an organizational weakness because individuals become less questioning and critical in following the leader. Disasters tend to exacerbate this issue by adding a lot of pressure for quick action and reducing individual confidence. Theoretically, a leader/organization that has experienced a disaster before might have more leadership influence that will even more swing the pendulum toward unquestioning followers.

Oddly enough, there is a scene in a movie that really captures this idea for me. The movie is a very mediocre B-move horror and most people haven’t seen it but it is about some shark researchers creating some smarter sharks and then, of course, everyone gets eaten. Samuel Jackson plays a strong leader who survived a major disaster in the past and everyone defers to his judgment because of his past experiences. In one scene, he is giving a moving speech about how he survived the that disaster and everyone is starting to feel good about their chances for survival because they have this great leader. Then a shark jumps out of the water and eats Samuel Jackson in the middle of his “if we stick together, we can survive this” speech.

Aside from being funny as hell, it’s a turning point in the movie because everyone shifts into thinking for themselves rather than following Jackson. Individuals are trying things that sometimes work and sometimes don’t, but they are not just blindly trusting and following the experiences of another.

The idea I am suggesting is that “past performance is no guarantee of future results” when it comes to leadership and disaster recovery, just like it is in financial affairs. An organization that doesn’t have a strong leader or prior disaster experience may actually have an advantage in terms of surviving and recovering from a disaster. I’m sure that’s not always true because some lessons learned from one disaster surely can be applied to another. But not all. And if organization’s don’t have enough critical thinking and learning skills, there may be deference that there shouldn’t be.