The Flu Brownie

The manufacturer of Tamiflu, the medicine that we'd all love to have handy in case of a bird flu pandemic, is currently back-ordered for over a year, with orders from other countries. The United States hasn't even place an order yet. Wouldn't it have been nice if the officials in our government in charge of public health had placed an order months ago, before they were sold out? But that would be too much to ask, since that official is out of the crony mold of our friend Michael Brown. He's the "Flu Brownie":

According to his official biography, Stewart Simonson is the Health and Human Services Department's point man "on matters related to bioterrorism and other public health emergencies." Hopefully, he has taken crash courses on smallpox and avian flu, because, prior to joining HHS in 2001, Simonson's background was not in public health, but ... public transit. He'd previously been a top official at the delay-plagued, money-hemorrhaging passenger rail company Amtrak. Before that, he was an adviser to Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson, specializing in crime and prison policy. When Thompson became HHS secretary in 2001, he hired Simonson as a legal adviser and promoted him to his current post shortly before leaving the Department last year. Simonson's biography boasts that he "supervised policy development for Project BioShield," a program designed to speed the manufacture of crucial vaccines and antidotes. "That effort, however, has by most accounts bogged down and shown few results," The Washington Post reported last month.

The only potential silver lining in all of this is that the administration is working hard to lay the groud for a good-government movement that may lead to people with actual competence, foresight, and good judgment being put in charge, replacing these corrupt cronies. Or so I have to tell myself.