White House Defends Its Response to H1N1 Outbreak
White
House officials defended their handling of the H1N1 outbreak after an uproar
over local officials' mistakes and what appeared to be their own misleading
comments.
"The
president has done everything humanly possible to get ready for this
epidemic," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Thursday.
Gibbs'
comments came just hours after reports that Wall Street giants Goldman Sachs
and Citigroup got vaccines for their high-risk workers while some hospitals and
clinics are still waiting for it.
"If
you're going to prioritize everybody who works in a contained area, maybe you
ought to be at elementary schools instead of Wall Street banks," said Rep.
Roy Blunt, R-Mo.
The
Service Employees International Union was more harsh in its criticism.
"It's
bad enough that Wall Street crashed our economy. But purposely endangering the
health of millions of Americans during a public health crisis crosses all lines
of decency," the union said in a statement.
Gibbs
blamed local officials that he said have already been scolded by the Centers
for Disease Control.
"The
CDC director is sending a letter to every state and city receiving vaccine to
reiterate that vaccine should be going to priority groups per the CDC,"
Gibbs said.
But
in recent days, Gibbs himself appeared to mislead when asked whether H1N1
vaccine would be given to detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
"There
is no vaccine in Guantanamo and there's no vaccine on the way to
Guantanamo," Gibbs said Tuesday.
A
day later, a Pentagon spokesman made clear Gibbs should have said
"yet" because vaccine will eventually be going to Gitmo based upon
the need to protect our forces from the risk posed by an outbreak of swine flu
within the confines of the detention facility.
Officials
say vaccine will be provided to U.S. troops overseas before it's sent to Gitmo,
but they won't say if that's before it's widely available to the general public
in this country, which is probably sometime in December. The White House says
pharmaceutical companies overestimated how fast they could create the vaccine
but critics say Obama waited too long to declare an emergency, which speeded up
the distribution process.
"The
president could have done some things 10 weeks ago that he did 10 or so days
ago to waive some liability concerns and some other things that get this
vaccine available," Blunt said.
The
White House is also fighting critics who say the swine flu missteps bode ill
for the push for health care reform. Gibbs says the connection is strained and
he rejects the claim that the vaccine shortages suggest health reform might not
be well thought out.
Source: foxnews.com