Friday, October 15, 2004

Bush misleading over flu-vaccine

I'm sure that the folks over at The Daily Mislead have a hard time picking what particular Bush whopper to highlight for the day. So I won't blame them for not reporting this one, I'll just do it myself.

During the third presidential debate, when asked about the shortage of flu vaccine this winter Bush said, an I quote from the transcript:

We relied upon a company out of England to provide about half of the flu vaccines for the United States citizen, and it turned out that the vaccine they were producing was contaminated. And so we took the right action and didn't allow contaminated medicine into our country.

Hello! That's Bushit and two counts! Firstly the shortage is because Chiron, an American company based in Emeryville, California, had their license for vaccine production in the United Kingdom pulled. Chiron acquired a production plant in the UK and fortunately for us the British authorities determined that output from that plant was contaminated and quickly prevented Chiron from continuing to use it. So secondly it wasn't the Americans that "took the right action", we actually have the British to thank for not letting the American public receive contaminated vaccine.

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