Infected Workers-Slow Deployment-No Vaccine: Ebola Response Shows Pitfalls of PRIVATIZED Health Care
Although the rate of new Ebola infections has slowed in some areas, the World Health Organization says it would be premature to read that as a success. New WHO projections suggest there could be between 5,000 and 10,000 new cases a week by December. The head of the United Nations Mission for Ebola Emergency Response told the U.N. Security Council that the steps implemented by the international community are not enough to halt the advance of the fatal disease. "This is an international humanitarian and health crisis," says Lawrence Gostin, university professor and faculty director at the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University. Gostin says privatized healthcare has undermined the U.S. response to Ebola, with a lack of available vaccines and access to proper care. "Much of our innovation is driven by the private sector, and from their point of view, Ebola was not a predictable disease and those who got Ebola were too poor to pay for it." We are also joined by Karen Higgins, co-president of National Nurses United.
from the transcript:
AMY GOODMAN: —now the NIH says they are developing a vaccine. It sounds like this has been possible for a long time, but private corporations—and which this is usually their purview—they knew there wasn’t a lot to be made in this profit-wise. So, this is why there were so few shots available, whether it’s a vaccine or other drugs. Can you talk about the importance of public health, and are vaccines possible in dealing with Ebola?
LAWRENCE GOSTIN: Yeah, I mean, the problem is, is that most of our innovation is driven by the private sector. And from their point of view, Ebola was not a predictable disease, and those who got Ebola were too poor to pay for it, and so there’s been a lack of investment. Not only were there not enough doses of ZMapp and things, but they weren’t even tested. There are only now vaccines and others going through clinical testing. And so, we really just don’t have those things on the ground.
Just want to make a very quick comment, if I can, about—we call ourselves the most advanced health system in the world, but what do we mean by that? I think what we mean by that is, is that we have the best of the best of the world. But we also have a highly variable system—so many different hospitals, so many different emergency rooms. We have over 3,500 local health authorities. Everybody is—we’ve got such different standards about what we can do. And what we need to do, as Karen says, is up our game. We need to be more uniform, and we need to have systems in place and the kind of equipment and training at every institution, so that this doesn’t happen again. It’s really unacceptable.
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http://www.democracynow.org/2014/10/15/infected_workers_slow_deployment_no_vaccines
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