The administration is making sure that Gitmo detainees get swine flu vaccine. And here I was worried that those heartless rat bastards in the White House would be too busy making excuses about why American families can’t get it (“It’s Bush’s fault!”) to make sure that the illegal combatants were protected.
Seriously, what is the probability that they’ll even be exposed?
Is “swine” flu halal?
Epidemics spread quickly in prisons, and prisoners (and prison staff) are therefore high priority recipients for vaccines. The fact that we are giving Gitmo detainees the vaccine before the President gets it sends a powerful message that we address public health issues based on science, not the power or popularity of the patients.
Epidemics spread quickly in prisons
Gitmo is not like most prisons. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to understand the significant differences and repeat the question — what is the probability that they’ll even be exposed?.
Any closed environment with a lot of people in it is a nesting place for airborne infections. Schools, hospitals, prisons.
Any closed environment with a lot of people in it is a nesting place for airborne infections.
Again, while this is true as a general statement, it doesn’t necessarily apply to Gitmo.
Well, imagine what would happen to Obama’s globalist humanitarian image — which is all that counts here — if 20% of the Gitmo inmates die in custody, even assuming everyone believes it was from swine flu.
what is the probability that they’ll even be exposed?
Gitmo detainees are not completely cut off from the rest of the world. Their guards, translators and lawyers come and go. The base itself is supplied by personnel from the U.S. mainland. Are they any less likely to be exposed than the inmates at a Supermax facility in Colorado?
Your wording (e.g. “illegal combatants”) suggests that you don’t consider Gitmo detainees to be worthy of vaccination. In fact, according to the DOD not all of the detainees are guilty of anything. If we were going by “worthiness” they’d get the vaccine before Supermax inmates. Fortunately we aren’t going by “worthiness,” just following standard public health procedures.
I dunno. Whenever significantly more people die from swine flu than bee stings then I will become somewhat interested.
If anything we could adopt the wackiness of the left and condemn the administration for purposely poisoning the detainees with all that evil mercury/preservatives/dihydrogen monoxide contained in the vaccine.
The base itself is supplied by personnel from the U.S. mainland.
Who can be checked for exposure prior to allowing them access to the facility.
Are they any less likely to be exposed than the inmates at a Supermax facility in Colorado?
Yes, quite a bit. A Supermax facility in Colorado probably shares guards with the lower-security facilities, which have all sorts of prisoner visits from family, etc. Gitmo is much more intrinsically easy to isolate from infection.
Your wording (e.g. “illegal combatants”) suggests that you don’t consider Gitmo detainees to be worthy of vaccination.
I think that they’d be worthy of going to the head of the line (as they did) if they had a significantly higher risk of exposure, but I don’t buy that they do.
Who can be checked for exposure prior to allowing them access to the facility.
How exactly do you propose to do that?
going to the head of the line (as they did)
Is there any evidence that they were treated differently than other military prisoners?
Kill them all, if not all are guilty, Allah the merciful will know his own.
That is what we Taliban do in Afghanistan.
At least the inoculations will be voluntary! Imagine the hue and cry that would go up around the world if the U.S. government were to force the inmates to be injected with the vaccine. Especially after the inmates are told by some well-meaning person that the vaccine contains pig fat extracted from old Enfield rifle cartridges.
Once again, who the heck cares whether they get swine flu?
Presuming that by now all the Gitmo detainees are Muslims, that makes them either traitors or enemy belligerents – that is if they are “good” Muslims – by the words of their own “holy” book written by Mohammed (hellfire and eternal damnation be upon him).
I’ve read the Koran. I even have a copy. It reads like the ramblings of a psychopath with a weak grip on reality; makes Mein Kampf (there is a strong resemblance to the ideas therein) look sensible.
No, I didn’t read it in Arabic. I have better things to do with my life than learn the language of a tribe of perverts and barbarians. (Perverts? Google “thighing” – but don’t do it too soon after eating.)
Before I start, let me say, I don’t get a flu shot ever. So I’m not worried about Abdullah bin Bombin getting my shot.
I took them years ago, spent several days with mild flu symptoms three years running and swore off. I hear yearly that it’s different now. Uh huh. Mrs Guillotines took the flu shot this year. Got it on a Thursday. By lunch time Friday, she has a headache, aches and her generally felt lousy for the entire weekend. No thanks, I’ll play flu roulette and see what happens.
Anyway…
I say by all means lets save these guys from dying of the flu, so we can eventually be free them, to go home and train to attack us while blowing themselves up with a bomb vest.
And all for the simple cost of removing a hard to get flu vaccine, from our own citizens, so these radical nuts can be safe from the flu.
Our leaders are SO FAR removed from rational thought as to be ridiculous. They are much more worried about their image in the world than they are about protecting the country.
Too bad the flu couldn’t attack just those with liberal thought patterns.
Morons.
BTW, I haven’t had the flu in 25 years. Maybe I’m over due, and maybe I’ll win the Powerball too.
Jim, the man who always thinks of the prisoners and the foreigners before the poor neighbors living on the street.
I love Guillotines’s logic. First claim that flu shots give you the flu (they don’t, they can’t), and then angrily decry that our citizens aren’t getting the shot while muslim extremists are. I think he meant to spell that “Morans” as his parting shot.
But the true spokesperson of wingnuttery should be Fletcher Christian. I love this line: “Presuming that by now all the Gitmo detainees are Muslims, that makes them either traitors or enemy belligerents.” Well damn, Fletch, just shoot ’em all, rule of law be damned.
Jim, the man who always thinks of the prisoners and the foreigners before the poor neighbors living on the street.
Leland, the conservative who thinks about the poor neighbor living on the street when it suits some bogus rhetorical argument, but who would otherwise say that people living on the street deserve to die in agonizing starvation because they’re too lazy to work.
They should probably also get flu shots to hasten their demise. Oh wait, that’s Guillotine logic again. I get you guys mixed up.
They are much more worried about their image in the world than they are about protecting the country.
Would it shock you to learn that caring about our image in the world is about protecting our country?
Jim, the man who always thinks of the prisoners and the foreigners before the poor neighbors living on the street.
It’s standard operating procedure to vaccinate prisoners — not because we “think of them first,” but because prisons are a breeding ground for epidemics. There are no doubt horrible people in Russian prisons (to take one example), but the drug-resistant TB that is widespread in those prisons is a threat to everyone, guilty or innocent.
The burden of proof should be on those who think we should abandon standard public health policies because the patients are unpopular.
I guess I nailed that one. I got a two-fer response. Neither one with much depth of reasoning in them. For instance, the comparison of Gitmo to Russian Gulags?
Rand’s question was, why were they first? What are the risks?
Jim’s response, we always treat prisoners doesn’t answer any questions. It’s a comment made by an automoton of the government. If the poor in cities are still waiting for flu shots and the prisoners of war get them first; then don’t ask questions of your government’s priority. Just stay the course.
When has Leland — or any other conservative — ever said that? I mean in real life, Dave, not the imaginary horrorshow inside your head.
That being said, I do think we shouldn’t claim we know what Jim thinks about his poor neighbors. He’s never mentioned them at all as far as I can recall. (If he has any; liberal yuppies, in my experience, tend to avoid living in neighborhoods with a lot of poor people in them.)
Jim Says:
November 3rd, 2009 at 6:41 am
“Would it shock you to learn that caring about our image in the world is about protecting our country?”
Yes, Jim. It is quite obvious that Obama wants to be community organizer for the World.
Just out of curiosity: How many Americans die of starvation every year?
Note that the question is not “How many Americans have experienced hunger,” I’m talking about actually dying of starvation.
Just out of curiosity: How many Americans die of starvation every year?
There’s supposed to be somewhere around 8 million US citizens suffering from eating disorders. That has to distort these figures.
Ah, from this 2007 report, wwe have in Table 2 a figure of 2810 deaths from malnutrition (2600) and other diet deficiencies (210). The total number of US deaths was 2.4 million roughly. So that’s a contribution of roughly 1 in 800 deaths and includes, as far as I can tell, some deaths from eating disorders.
I love Guillotines’s logic. First claim that flu shots give you the flu (they don’t, they can’t),
Slept through biology class, did we?
The way a vaccine immunizes you against a disease can indeed be to give you a mild form of the disease. These are the most effective vaccines, which use “weakened” viruses rather than viral fragments. The oral polio and nasal spray flu vaccines are examples of these types. In certain susceptible individuals, or in some previous sad cases of insufficient uniformity of weakening, it certainly has been the case that people have gotten full-blown polio from polio vaccines, and full-blown influenza from flu vaccines.
In any event, by definition to become immune, you must provoke an immune response, and the early symptoms of flu are exactly the hallmarks of an immune response. So Sharpen the G’s suspicions are perfectly sound.
Nor is he unreasonable to play influenza roulette, so long as he is himself not immunocompromised, nor cares for people with weaker immune systems or respiratory weakness, e.g. the elderly of infants under 6 months, cancer patients, whatever. Non-pandemic flu does not often kill healthy adults.
On the other hand, if he really does have an unusually strong reaction to influenza vaccine, that would suggest he is one of those unlucky people who have an unusually strong (and possibly fatal) reaction to flu itself. (It is usually your body’s response to influenza that does you in, not the influenza itself.) So that would argue that he should get vaccinated, as it is the lesser of the two evils.
“Well damn, Fletch, just shoot ‘em all, rule of law be damned.”
Precisely. Either traitors or enemy belligerents out of uniform, captured on the field of battle. The Geneva Convention, so loved by the left, is very clear on the treatment allowable for the latter. One thing they are definitely NOT is prisoners of war. Unless, that is, any of them were wearing a uniform when caught. Specifically an Iraqi uniform, in fact.
There’s supposed to be somewhere around 8 million US citizens suffering from eating disorders. That has to distort these figures.
Yah, a random google search suggests a mortality of 5-10% among eating disorder patients over 10 years. Taking the lower figure means a death rate of 0.05% per year, or 4000 deaths per year. That is way more than the total deaths by malnutrition (which also have to include those infants and children who die of neglect, a few dozen per year).
But it’s within the margin of crude error, so I think a reasonable conclusion would be that eating disorders and child neglect can account for every single death by malnutrition in the United States.
Which would mean that the number of Americans who starve to death in the conventional sense, i.e. do not starve themselves nor are starved by their parents, is zero to within measurement error.
For instance, the comparison of Gitmo to Russian Gulags?
I wasn’t talking about Gulags, I was referring to prisons for run of the mill criminals in Russia today. For more information about the TB epidemic in those prisons, see here.
Rand’s question was, why were they first?
No one has pointed to any evidence that they were first, or that they were treated any differently than prisoners at any other military prison.
Jim’s response, we always treat prisoners doesn’t answer any questions. It’s a comment made by an automoton of the government. If the poor in cities are still waiting for flu shots and the prisoners of war get them first; then don’t ask questions of your government’s priority. Just stay the course.
The answer can be found in the reams of public health research published in the last century, which led to vaccination of prisoners being considered a high priority.
If you think the public health community doesn’t know what it’s doing, by all means do the research, write the papers, and prove them wrong. But to start from the assumption that they are wrong, and that we’d be better off having laypeople design public health programs, sounds crazy and dangerous to me.
Either traitors or enemy belligerents out of uniform, captured on the field of battle.
The DOD has concluded that some of the detainees are neither — they’re just people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and nobody wants them, so they pass the years in Gitmo while we try to figure out what to do with them.
and nobody wants them
Odd that nobody wants them, Jim. If they’re as harmless as you say.
No one has pointed to any evidence that they were first, or that they were treated any differently than prisoners at any other military prison.
And no one has claimed that they were first before other prisoners, so there is no need for such evidence. I was pointing out that they’re first before millions of American families who still can’t get it.
If you think the public health community doesn’t know what it’s doing, by all means do the research, write the papers, and prove them wrong.
There papers you mention, who wrote them? Roemer?
But to start from the assumption that they are wrong, and that we’d be better off having laypeople design public health programs, sounds crazy and dangerous to me.
What sounds crazy is the suggestion you are anything but a layperson. My wife participated in the Healthy People 2010 project (I’d say look it up at the government website, but it appears the transparent Obama administration now requires a userid and password to access it). What experience do you bring to the table?
Slept through biology class, did we?
Certainly, but since then I’ve read things. You, apparently, have not. If you read up on vaccinations you would understand the four types: live attenuated vaccines, killed vaccines, toxoid vaccines, and component vaccines. The vast majority of influenza vaccines are of the killed vaccine variety. You can’t actually get the flu from these shots.
On the other hand, if he really does have an unusually strong reaction to influenza vaccine, that would suggest he is one of those unlucky people who have an unusually strong (and possibly fatal) reaction to flu itself.
Severe adverse reactions are extremely rare. Most have to do with allergic reactions to proteins in the egg component used to cultivate the virus.
Rand is theoretically a man of science, I would love to hear him chime in on this.
Certainly, but since then I’ve read things. You, apparently, have not.
Keep reading, it is good for you.
If you read up on vaccinations you would understand the four types: live attenuated vaccines, killed vaccines, toxoid vaccines, and component vaccines.
The CDC authorizes two types of vaccination: The shot, which uses inactived “killed” flu viruses; and the nasal spray, which uses the live attenuated virus.
The vast majority of influenza vaccines are of the killed vaccine variety.
And your source is? What does vast mean to you? The CDC tends to suggest the availability of the nasal spray is about as good as the shot. I’m sure it is not 1:1. But is 3:1 vast?
Severe adverse reactions are extremely rare.
Ok, but the symptoms described by Sharp included headaches and fever, and not severe allergic reaction (work on your reading skills). Those symptoms are listed as common side affects of both the shot and the nasal spray. To many people, that’s enough of an annoyance to do without it. And before you come back with, “a minor annoyance is something less than dealing with the flu itself or having an outbreak” tell us where you stand on waterboarding. Perhaps prisoners don’t like the minor annoyance of a headache and fever either, even if it leaves no lasting effects and could save others.
And before you come back with, “a minor annoyance is something less than dealing with the flu itself or having an outbreak” tell us where you stand on waterboarding. Perhaps prisoners don’t like the minor annoyance of a headache and fever either, even if it leaves no lasting effects and could save others.
This argument, from what I can make of it, makes no sense.
For the record, I think that waterboarding is a moral outrage that our parents and grandparents would have considered unworthy of America during WWII. Are you claiming that suffering an annoyance from a flu vaccine is just like being waterboarded?
I don’t know. I’m still trying to calibrate your levels.
CDC provides two forms of vaccination, but you claim a “vast” difference in availability.
Sharp says he had common aches and pains associated with flu shots, and you compared them to severe allergic reactions.
Sharp said those annoyances were enough for him to chance it with the flu rather than the consistent annoyance of the shot. You took that to mean the flu shot doesn’t work.
So, you ignored my request to define your levels. But I caught you on the other bait left for you. Unfortunately, you still use hyperbole, and you are apparently ignorant of history too.