Public Health Job Losses Are Threatening H1N1 Vaccination Ability

October 6, 2009 (LPAC)—The first shipment (600,000 doses) of H1N1 ("swine flu") vaccine started shipping from the Federal government Oct. 5, but the nationwide public health infrastructure the United States once had for delivering a mass vaccination campaign to the population, is disappearing. The Wall Street Journal) gives numbers on its collapse, and quotes University of Minnesota public health expert Michael Osterholm, that the Federal delivery flow to 90,000 sites across the country, will connect to "a rusty faucet" of a public health system.

From January 2008 to June 2009, at least 16,000 out of the 102,000 state/territorial public health workers then employed in the nation (15%) had their jobs eliminated. And during the same 18-month period, 8,000 of 155,000 local (city and county) public health workers were fired, 12,000 more put on short work, or a 13% cut. Furthermore, in the three months reported since June, U.S. cities have cut 68,000 jobs, net; if even 10% of those cuts were health departments and clinics, then both state and local public health workforces have shrunk by 15% or more in the very recent past. This make the actual administration of the vaccine not only late if the epidemic become very widespread again, but also problematical in even being able to carry out the job.

As one result, states are being forced into the insane policy we've associated with Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon—hiring private-contractor healthcare providers under expensive contracts, to give flu shots their own public health workers would have given, much less expensively, if they hadn't fired them to save money!

So much for the Obama Administration's vaunted "don't panic anybody" strategy for the vaccination effort, and the couple of billion dollars of "stimulus" money which has supported it.