Inherent unfairness makes the hiring of relatives wrong

By JAMES P. PINKERTON
LONG ISLAND NEWSDAY
The big news from President Bush's news conference Tuesday was Harriet Miers, but there was even bigger news, potentially -- about the prevention of disease and death.
The media love a fight, and thus the headline atop Wednesday's Washington Post: "Bush Defends Supreme Court Pick." But some issues are simply more important, even if they are somewhat abstract, at least for now. The danger is that if we ignore important abstractions now, they will kill us -- literally -- in the future.
So we might take a closer look at the threat of avian influenza -- bird flu. To most people, a case of seasonal flu means a sentence of bed rest. But for about 40,000 Americans a year, it's a death sentence. Public health advocates have been warning for years that new strains of flu, such as H5N1, could be mass killers. That particular bug has killed about 60 people in Asia, but epidemiologists warn that if it continues to spread, it could kill tens of millions around the world, including perhaps a half-million Americans. And, of course, cost the economy hundreds of billions of dollars.
So the stakes are not small. And in the wake of 9/11 and Katrina, we have learned that abstractions have a way of becoming importantly real. Not so long ago, scenarios for a terrorist mega-attack were confined to pulp thrillers. And hurricanes? Until recently, few knew about "Cat 5" or what FEMA stood for.
Yet it's revealing of the way the media work, and the way reporters think, that during the Tuesday presidential press conference, only the 13th reporter with a question asked about a possible avian flu pandemic.
Happily for the country, the president was ready with a substantive answer. He mentioned the federal officials he had been meeting with, recalling that he had mentioned the topic to the United Nations last month; he even cited a book he'd been reading on the great flu epidemic of 1918. In his answer, Bush further considered issues of vaccine-manufacturing capacity and whether the military should be involved in possible quarantining.
System is working
Critics might say, "Aha, Bush is simply trying to avoid another Katrina, where he seemed so clueless and his popularity fell." To which one might answer: That's the point. The system is working. Bush made a mistake on Katrina, allowing himself to be blindsided by an abstraction-turned-mass-killer. And he has resolved not to be taken unawares again.
The Loyal Opposition asserts that it has been the real leader on the flu issue. On the day of Bush's press conference, a letter signed by 33 Senate Democrats arrived at the White House, noting that the Senate had added $4 billion to the budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention the week before to deal with concerns such as bird flu. The Democrats want credit for this public-health foresightedness and were no doubt annoyed that Bush did not mention them in his presser. That's politics for you.
But from the larger national perspective, the system is working. Just as the Founders intended, two branches of government, executive and legislative, are checking and balancing each other. And out of that process of scrutinizing and sniping, the commonweal is served.
One well-placed observer, Laura Segal of the Trust for America's Health, a private advocacy group based in Washington, notes that the president's comments indicate a high priority given to this health issue. Still, Segal is waiting to see the details of the administration's pandemic preparedness plan. She warns: "Right now, the country is far away from being adequately prepared." If Segal is right, there's plenty of work yet to be done. Strange as it may seem, the American way is for the various branches, as well as the political parties, to duke it out. And, even more strangely, that system actually works most of the time. Let's hope it works in the case of avian flu, because millions of lives are at stake.
X Pinkerton is a Newsday columnist. Distributed by the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service