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Clock ticking on antiflu offer

By A TIMES EDITORIAL
Published March 21, 2007

Florida is about to lose out on a federal subsidy potentially worth $100-million. Not smart, you say? It gets worse. The subsidy would help the state stockpile an antiviral drug that could be the best early defense for Floridians during a flu pandemic.

The subsidy works this way: The federal government has offered states a substantial discount to purchase Tamiflu, an antiviral recommended by the World Health Organization as the best protection during a flu pandemic until a vaccine is developed. When such a virus spread across the world in 1918, 50-million people died worldwide, more than 10 percent of them in the United States. A similar outbreak today would hospitalize an estimated 640,000 Floridians, and since pandemics come along every three or four decades (the last was 37 years ago), our luck could be running out.

The state is eligible to receive about 2-million treatment courses of Tamiflu at a federally subsidized cost of $15 each. Not a bad deal considering the drug retails for several times that amount and if a pandemic strikes, there would likely be a severe shortage.

The federal government has given the state until Friday to decide if it wants in on the program. Gov. Crist, who put more than $30-million in his budget for an antiviral-drug stockpile, wants to take advantage of the deal and tried to reassure everyone Tuesday that the state will find the money. After all, if the state waits until after Friday to make up its mind, the cost of providing Tamiflu for a significant portion of Florida residents would be an estimated $130-million. Every other state has already signed up for the subsidy.

But this is Florida, where the Legislature is cheap and proud of it, so lawmakers haven't put a penny in their budget proposals for the drug stockpile. Their attitude: Why spend money for something that might not happen? Yes, Tamiflu has only a five-year shelf life, and a flu pandemic could be further off than that.

Here's another way to look at it: For about $2 per state resident, the Legislature could be prepared to save thousands of lives should a flu pandemic arrive without warning. Is that a waste of money? Only in Florida, apparently.

[Last modified March 20, 2007, 21:22:29]