President Bush yesterday raised the possibility that the U.S. military should be used to quarantine parts of the country if a dreaded outbreak of bird flu occurs.
“The policy questions for a president in dealing with an avian flu outbreak are difficult,” Bush said. “One example: If we had an outbreak somewhere in the United States, do we not then quarantine that part of the country? And how do you, then, enforce a quarantine?”
One possible answer, Bush suggested, would be the military: “I think it’s an important debate for Congress to have.”
His remarks brought to a head an issue that has been gaining steam for the past week: How prepared is the federal government to respond to a bird flu pandemic?
As the Washington Post reported today, “A strain of avian influenza called H5N1 has led to the death of more than 140 million birds in Asia.” The disease has been limited to Asia thus far, rarely infecting humans, and then only from contact with birds. But of 116 people who have been infected, 60 have died — an astonishingly high death rate.
The danger lies in a feared mutation of the virus that would allow it to spread, as the president said yesterday, “when it goes bird-person-person.” Though there have not yet been any reported odds of a pandemic happening, David Nabarro, the World Health Organization’s newly appointed coordinator for avian and human influenza, warned last Thursday that a pandemic could come anytime and “the range of deaths could be anything between 5 and 150 million.” Papers including the Washington Post and Chicago Tribune ran an Associated Press story with the fearsome headline, “New Flu Pandemic Could Kill 150 Million.” (The next day the WHO quickly backpedaled from Nabarro’s horrific estimate, saying a death toll of between 2 million to 7.4 million would be more realistic. “We’re not going to know how lethal the next pandemic is going to be until the pandemic begins,” said Dick Thompson, a WHO flu spokesman.)
With all that in mind, we examined how some major print media reported the bird flu story today.
In a classic speech story roundup, the AP’s Jennifer Loven focused on Bush’s request for the military option. It was a good rundown, with context, noting, “The president has already indicated he wants to give the armed forces lead responsibility for conducting search-and-rescue operations and sending in supplies after massive natural disasters and terrorist attacks.” The story quoted Irwin Redlener, director of Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness, as saying that Bush’s new suggestion yesterday would amount to “martial law in the United States.”
What was missing, though, was reporting on what the government is doing to prepare for a coming outbreak.
The Washington Post‘s David Brown took a similar tack, focusing on the military’s possible role in a pandemic and how quarantines would be effected. But news of government preparations was extremely limited, as the story only noted that a federal “pandemic-response plan” was due soon, and — in the last paragraph — that “The government is stockpiling antiviral medications and an experimental ‘bird flu’ vaccine as a defense against the virus, should it develop the capacity to spread easily and quickly in human beings.” (To be fair to the Post, it also published a science-heavy article last Thursday reporting that National Institutes of Health researchers were working “to develop a library of vaccines for more than a dozen strains of avian flu.”)
Knight Ridder’s Ron Hutcheson, meanwhile, focused on how Bush’s speech raised “fears of a deadly flu pandemic”: “‘It’s not a question of if; it’s a question of when. It’s scary,’ said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, who has urged the administration to take a more aggressive approach. ‘If that pandemic hit next month, we’d be in a world of hurt.”’
Leave it to the New York Times‘ Gardiner Harris, then, to really get to the heart of the story today, managing to avoid the political possibilities suggested by Bush’s speech and instead leading off with this:
Health officials have warned for years that a virulent bird flu could kill millions of people, but few in Washington have seemed alarmed. After a closed-door briefing last week, however, fear of an outbreak swept official Washington, which was still reeling from the poor response to Hurricane Katrina.
The day after the briefing, led by Michael O. Leavitt, the secretary of Health and Human Services, and other senior government health officials, the Senate squeezed $3.9 billion for flu preparations into a Pentagon appropriations bill.
On Wednesday, Senate Democrats plan to introduce another bill calling for the creation of a flu pandemic coordinator within the White House and a federal buy-back program for unused flu vaccines, among other measures, according to a draft of the bill. …
Thirty-two Democratic senators sent a letter to President Bush on Tuesday expressing “grave concern that the nation is dangerously unprepared for the serious threat of avian influenza.”
The story featured an interview with Leavitt in which he acknowledged that “the United States was not prepared for a pandemic flu outbreak.” But the article also reported on a number of steps Leavitt and the government are taking to address the problem, including the purchase of “millions of courses” of antiviral drug treatment (with “a goal of having on hand 20 million”) and the underwriting of research to spur the creation of vaccines. The story pressed Leavitt to respond, “We need a plan. I’m resolved to make sure we have one and so is the president.”
But it turns out that the Los Angeles Times did its New York counterpart one better, publishing its story Monday. Warren Vieth reported that Leavitt’s Department of Health and Human Services was racing to complete its comprehensive plan, “expected to be accompanied by a request for several billion dollars in new funding,” and added this:
The government has begun contracting with pharmaceutical makers to develop vaccines targeted at new strains of influenza virus. It has started stockpiling millions of doses of antiviral medicines that could limit symptoms and reduce the chances of spreading the virus. President Bush is pressuring other countries to conduct better surveillance for flu outbreaks, share information more readily and commit to aggressive containment measures.
The story quoted the president — “I talked to Vladimir about avian flu; I talked to other world leaders about the potential outbreak of avian flu” — and Vieth noted that “Scientists cannot create the best possible vaccine until they know which form of the virus they’re fighting.” But since the process from creation to administration of the vaccine would take six to eight months, antiviral medicines would become crucially important, Vieth added.
All in all, the Los Angeles Times piece was a prime example of focus on the issues that matter to readers. It’s important that the president is thinking about the influenza issue, and his unorthodox military quarantine proposal certainly merits space. But keeping attention on the government’s preparations may well prod Uncle Sam to stay on track, leaving us all better equipped if — or when — a bird flu doomsday arrives.
–Edward B. Colby
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.