somebody didn't think this one through: public health edition

my primary insurance is medicare, which means my primary insurer is a very large insurer who covers an awful lot of people.

day before yesterday i got my flu shot.

yes, i know it's late int he season, but better now that not, especially since this year's flu is virulent and deadly. it's not the 1918 flu, but it's more like that flu than we'd like it to be.

and we're about due for a deadly flu pandemic.

so you'd think that public health policy would be to do everything possible to get flu vaccine into people.

but no.

i went early in the season to get the vaccine from my pharmacy and it turns out my insurance doesn't cover it if i get it at the pharmacy. my insurance covers it if i make an appointment with my doctor, which means that i had a two month delay in getting vaccinated.

i wonder how many people simply decided not to bother?

i'm just going to bet that public health policy will shift very strongly toward getting everybody those vaccines free of charge when and only when the body count gets so high that they have to roll dead carts again.

my grandmother remembered living in guttenberg NJ during the 1918 flu and having the dead carts roll the streets every day calling for people to bring out their dead.

that was barely a hundred years ago. there was no vaccine then. part of what made THAT flu so deadly is that it created such a violent immune response in otherwise healthy people that their own immune systems attacked their lungs and killed them, trying to get at the virus. the more robust you were, the more likely it was that your flu would kill you.

and part of what made that flu so deadly was the chronic underreporting of the danger.

this time around we LOVE reporting all the cases but we're not doing so well in making it easy for everyone to get immunized. we're also not good at pressuring companies to make their sick workers stay home.

oh, sure, a lot of companies SAY sick workers should stay home, but i bet you can think of more than one grocery clerk you've seen working sick because they can't afford to stay home.

people who don't have access to healthcare and can't afford to take sick days put us all at risk.