Trading on fear to pass vaccine legislation is wrong

When legislators start playing on the worst fears of people, the people should be worried. And when legislators begin attaching complex legislation with far-reaching effects to must-pass bills -- a tactic designed to grease the way for passage with virtually no debate -- people should be alarmed.
The American people should be both worried and alarmed by the efforts of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to ram through legislation in the name of protecting the nation from a bird flu epidemic. The bill would not only indemnify the pharmaceutical industry from suits involving death, disability or sickness resulting from the use of pandemic flu vaccines, but would create a new secret bureaucracy to shield the government's health decisions from public scrutiny.
The need to provide some sort of protection to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies that provide life-saving vaccines is arguably necessary.
Even though a study by Harvard public health professors reported in the October 2004 Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that there were only 10 vaccine-related civil lawsuits brought in the United States in the last 20 years, wariness by pharmaceutical companies in pursuing new vaccines is understandable. In today's litigious climate, it only takes one big mistake to bankrupt a company.
Vigorous debate necessary
But the need to protect vaccine providers from unreasonable risks should be vigorously and openly debated in Congress. If companies are to be indemnified against potential catastrophic losses by the federal government, should the federal government share in any extraordinary profits a company makes when its vaccine is a market success?
But there will be no such discussion of hypotheticals if Frist has his way. He is attempting to attach the liability shield bill of Sen. Richard Burr, R-S.C., onto a must-pass defense spending bill.
Even more troubling, S.B 1873 would establish the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency within the Department of Health and Human Services. BARDA would be presided over by a presidential appointee and would assume many of the functions of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. But unlike the CDC and NIH, BARDA would be exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.
And working in secrecy, BARDA would have the sole authority to determine what medical equipment, drugs and vaccines would be shielded from civil lawsuits.
We have editorialized before about the penchant for the Bush administration, which backs S.B. 1873, to try to expand the secrecy under which government operates. It began long before the threat of avian flu, even before Sept. 11, 2001. But the administration and its supporters have not been shy about using fears of disease or terrorism or national security to further a goal of being able to operate with less and less public oversight.
If Burr's bill is a good one, it should be able survive the healthy debate that is supposed to be a part of the legislative process. Likewise, if bureaucrats are making life and death decisions regarding the medical care that is available to the American people, they should be subject to the same Freedom of Information law that existing public health agencies work under.