Received in email:
One factual error is that Chiron is an American Company, outsourcing their flu vaccinations to Britain, not a British company.
I love the subject line: “This may be a lie, but it’s still worth spreading!”
I also find it hard to believe that a “young man” successfully sued a vaccine company because he got a different flu strain than what the vaccine protected against. Is there any truth in this? Some quick googling came up nil.
thanks.
I can’t confirm or deny based on Googling but considering Cheney speechified Monday on the vaccine shortage, blaming in part thr threat of lawsuits, I find it impossible to believe that he would not have mentioned John Edwards’ representing someone who sued over a flu shot if it actually happened.
Another example like Otto’s: At the Ocotber 13 debate, President Bush also talked about the vaccine shortage and partially blamed it on lawsuits. If John Edwards had really been involved in a suit that drove a company out of the vaccine business, Bush would definitely have mentioned it.
Hooboy. Let me begin by saying that I don’t know whether or not John Edwards ever sued a company for giving someone the flu via a vaccine. But Otto makes good points, and even if Edwards did sue, there are plenty of errors and the glurge to make up for it.
Making the vaccine in Britain in no way indemnifies a company from lawsuits in this country for vaccines distributed here.
As the glurge mentions, the batches were recalled because British officials found unsanitary conditions in the labs. How would making flu batches in unsanitary conditions here have changed anything?
The alleged victim in the lawsuit either caught the flu from the vaccine, or the vaccine failed to work; one or the other. That means that it wasn’t a frivolous lawsuit.
Pharmaceutical companies do not produce products “as a favor.” They are here to make a profit, and within the restrictions specified by the FDA, they pretty much deal with a free market in this country. The prices were therefore due to supply and demand forces.
Notice the lack of details: no company was named as the target of the lawsuit. No name for the “North Carolina man” was produced. No city wherein the lawsuit was filed. No date. Nothing that would make it possible to verify any of it. That is one of the primary halmarks of an urban legend.
I’m sure others can find more errors and inconsistencies.
More errors: Chiron is based in Emeryville, California – they’re not a “British company” – not that it matters, since British companies can be sued in the U.S.
Flu vaccine is subject to price controls, uncertain market conditions, a difficult manufacturing process, and a handful of lawsuits. It ain’t profitable enough for big pharma, which is used to huge profits.
My other points have already been made, but I’ll point out that there is a big world out there, and no one wants to make flu vaccine for ANY market. There are only a handful of manufacturers worldwide.
If the vaccine is subject to price controls in the US, how are suppliers able to raise prices? There have been plenty of examples recently, with plenty of grumbling of price gouging around the country.
Funny, I just got this in my e-mail this AM. How funny is that!
I also checked at Snopes and didn’t find it in their database. I’m sure they will come to the same conclusion our Teeming Milliions have come to already. 
Oh, and here is a page with a selection of his trials, with product liability trials at the top of them. The link on that page to the Thomson Legal Record is available only for legal professionals, which I am not. Could someone who is dig up the full info?
It’s a strange message. Its point seems not to be to explain the flu vaccine, but to dis John Edwards. The strange thing is that Edwards’ trial lawyer career can be thruthfully dissed without having to resort to made-up glurge. I guess they just wanted something more topical.
Well, I think that the basic point of the e-mail stands.
There are price controls on the American vaccine market. Combined with the threat of large torts, this yields very slim margins on the vaccine business with high risks. Consequently, there are few players in the market, and a manufacturing disruption at any of these companies yields major shortages in flu vaccine.
Yes, it is a criticism of John Edwards.
Does someone want to claim that Edwards is on the side of controlling medical torts or reducing price controls on the vaccine market?
Cite, please? I’ve been googling and can’t seem to find anything stating so.
Hmmm… really?
Try typing some of the following into Google:
vaccine price controls (112,000 hits)
Sure you’re spelling vaccine correctly? Here’s the first link:
http://www.seacoastonline.com/news/10112004/editoria/42374.htm
This is GQ. Please provide some factual evidence that John Edwards is somehow reponsible for the shortage of flu vaccine.
The OP claims that the reason for the lawsuit is that someone who had received the vaccine got the flu anyway, and that it was one of the strains that was included in the flu. The flu vaccine is known not to be 100% effective – no vaccines are. (One source says it’s 70% to 90% effective in healthy adults.) If the person was not told that the vaccine was 100% effective, there are three possible reasons.
I think that it’s probably been well-known that the flu vaccine isn’t 100% effective for some time. Someone who was vaccinated in the 80s in North Carolina probably would have been told something similar to what you’d be told now – that it’s not 100% effective. Basically, the premise in the article seems unlikely, especially when it’s considered along with the political motivation.
You’re disputing that the e-mail was meant as a criticism of John Edwards? Well, I really didn’t consider that point to be debatable.
Is he really responsible? Maybe, this is GQ.
Is this e-mail claiming that he is responsible? Uhh, I think it’s pretty obvious, and that’s what I meant when I said, “Yes, it is a criticism of John Edwards.” If I wasn’t clear, then apologies, and by “it” I meant the e-mail in the OP.
Yes, I have done such a search. I guess I just disagree what “price controls” are. The government offering to buy vaccines at a particular price-point, and suppliers agreeing to sell vaccines at said price does not sound like price controls to me. No one is forcing the suppliers to sell at that price. There are other markets that a supplier can sell to. Hospitals, doctors, nurses all buy them and supply them to patients for a fee that’s related to the price they themselves buy them at. The government will have to raise its offering price to the level that suppliers are willing to sell it; otherwise patients will go to the above hospitals/doctors/nurses or do without.
Sites that label the government purchase of vaccines as price controls seem to be of uniformly pro tort-reform bent, many citing a particular Wall Street Journal editorial. Other sites that are pro medical-reform link the lack of vaccine to the naturally-low demand for such vaccines (compared to Viagra, Oxycotin, etc.), the turnaround time to produce more vaccine (4 to 6 months) and the fact that vaccines not sold in a given year are worthless the next year.
And we still have seen no evidence that John Edwards has been involved in any lawsuit related to vaccines, much less a “frivolous” lawsuit as quoted in the OP.
Some more concretely factual information: the first paragraph under ‘how the flu vaccine works’ is lifted word-for-word from Dr. Robert H. Schmerling’s ‘Getting a Flu Shot – Will it cause the flu?’ at Intellihealth. The second paragraph may have been lifted from an earlier version of the same article, since I cannot find it elsewhere.
I guess I was confused by this:
Sounds like a very thinly-veiled indictment, to me. Whatever.
The flu vaccine shortage must have been an annoyance at conservative glurge headquarters. It was a big story but it was a hard one to get the right spin on.
“What caused the flu vaccine shortage? Can we blame the government?”
“We are the government.”
“We can say it’s Clinton’s fault.”
“That’s usually good, but some egghead might point out that flu vaccine is made up each year.”
“Let’s blame it all on Chiron. It sounds like a French name.”
“They’re British.”
“Still, we can blame it on foreign companies taking away American business.”
“You must be new here. We’re in favor of free trade.”
“How about the unsanitory conditions?”
“And we’re against government regulation. Didn’t you get your orientation?”
“Maybe we can blame it on big drug companies in general?”
“Listen, Trotsky, if we wanted to make an argument for a public health system, we’d be working for Hillary Clinton.”
“Sorry, boss.”
“I don’t want to hear apologies. The election’s less than two weeks away and I want to hear something we can post on the internet so every person who gets the flu in the next fourteen days blames it on the Democrats. You’ve got one hour or start packing your desk.”
Just to let everyone know, because of my e-mail to Barbara Mikkelson about this, she has put up this page at Snopes.