This won’t hurt a bit

Another flu season, another vaccine shortage.
Other than that, there’s cause for concern but not panic.

Judging by the near-panic developing in some quarters, reasonable people might conclude we’re experiencing the worst flu season ever. Perhaps we will but, so far, as is often the case, reality is running behind perception.

That doesn’t mean we should all stop washing our hands and start hugging and kissing with wild abandon under the mistletoe. It’s still flu season, and prudence should be the order of the day.

The flu each year is reliably blamed for killing an estimated 36,000 Americans, more than 90 percent of whom are over 65. Young children, who lack immunity, are also at particular risk.

Finally, there is the flu vaccine itself. Or, make that the lack of it.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta estimates supplies will run out in a week or two. While more than 83 million doses were produced, a spate of early flu deaths among children spurred an increase in the number of those seeking vaccinations and the national stockpile quickly dwindled.

The situation is no different in Santa Barbara County, where county health officials have given out twice as many shots this year as last and only several hundred doses or so are left from just a couple of sources.

The remaining doses are rightly being held back to be administered to those who need them most. In that camp, of course, are the homeless, and Sansum Medical Clinic Foundation is spearheading an effort to get the last shots out to that segment of our population.

While the number of vaccines produced this year is roughly the same as last, it’s useful to know there are just five vaccine makers and that it takes them four months to produce enough for one typical flu season.

Unfortunately — for a lot of Americans, it turns out — there have been seven previous preventative vaccine shortages in the last three years alone. Why there aren’t more companies in the business is a classic price-control nightmare. That’s an editorial for another time but it’s a topic we’re fated to revisit as the government tightens its stranglehold on the Medicare drug program.

An editor for all times

As a community newspaper, we usually don’t stray far from the South Coast for editorial material, unless we believe the topic is of keen local importance or interest. If you’ll indulge us a rare exception, we’d like to toast Bob Bartley, the Wall Street Journal editor emeritus and columnist to whom President Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom last week. Bartley died of cancer Wednesday as we were going to press. He was just 66.

Perhaps no journalist is more deserving of the nation’s highest civilian honor because few journalists have had such a profound effect on the times in which they wrote. As Bush himself said, Bartley was “a champion of free markets, individual liberty and the values necessary for a free society. His writings have been characterized by profound insights, passionate convictions, a commitment to democratic principles and an unyielding optimism in America.”

Turning the Journal’s editorial page, as he put it, into “the mouthpiece of supply-side economics” was his proudest achievement.

It is with pride that we look to him as a role model and to his legacy on the Journal’s editorial pages as an example of what a serious editorial section should be. His thoughtful voice will be sorely missed but never silenced.

Godspeed, Bob. Well done.