Kerry Links Bush to Vaccine Woes

Seizing on an issue that has triggered anxiety around the country, Sen. John F. Kerry on Saturday accused the Bush administration of ignoring warnings about vulnerabilities in the nation’s flu vaccine supply, citing the current shortage as an example of the president’s shortsightedness.

“Because of this administration’s failure of leadership, failure of judgment -- because of their failure to act -- we’ve got a shortfall of some 48 million flu vaccines in our country,” Kerry told supporters who packed a high school gym in the town of Xenia in southeastern Ohio.

“So what’s happening with the flu vaccine is really an example of everything this administration does: Deny it, pretend it’s not there, and then try to hide it when it comes out -- act surprised,” the Democrat said.

On a two-day bus tour through the Midwest, Kerry focused on many rural counties that backed the president by large margins four years ago.

Xenia, for example, is located in Greene County, which Bush won by 20 percentage points. In Wisconsin on Friday, he visited Sheboygan County, which Bush won by 11 points, and Outagamie County, where Bush had a 10-point margin of victory.

Kerry aides said that although they did not expect to win those areas, they had enough confidence in their get-out-the-vote operations in Democratic strongholds that they were trying to drive up turnout in other areas.

“The advantage of having an organization deep enough is that you can go out and do this kind of thing,” said senior advisor Mike McCurry.

On Saturday, Kerry’s bus tour took him past cornfields and hillsides in southeastern Ohio and parts of Appalachia that voted overwhelmingly for Bush in 2000.

The Massachusetts senator shopped for pumpkins at a roadside farm and bought a hunting license at a village grocery. Aides said he would use the license on a visit to the state next week. At an evening rally held in Wakefield, the chairperson of the local board of commissioners presented Kerry with a shotgun.

The candidate also used Saturday’s Democratic radio address to criticize Bush for restricting federal funding for stem-cell research. Kerry said he would make funding the research “a top priority in our government agencies, our universities and our medical community.”

Kerry began the day with a town hall meeting at Xenia High School, where he delivered his stinging rebuke of the Bush administration for failing to ensure an adequate stock of flu shots. Kerry’s campaign also released a television ad about the shortage, calling it a “Bush mess.”

In early October, the company that provides half of the country’s flu vaccines announced that it could not provide shots because of contamination in its British factory.

Kerry noted that health officials warned three years ago that relying on just a handful of flu vaccine manufacturers could jeopardize the supply, and said that the government did not act last summer when U.S. health regulators discovered quality-control problems at a flu vaccine factory in Liverpool, England.

“They didn’t do anything,” he said. “They ignored it.”

“In our administration, we’re not going to blame everybody else and look for excuses,” the candidate added. “I’m going to get that Harry Truman sign back out, and the buck stops here!”

Bill Pierce, a Health and Human Services Department spokesman, said Saturday that Kerry’s charges were not accurate, adding that U.S. regulators had worked with the vaccine maker to correct a potential problem they had spotted in 2003. He said regulators found no major problems during a visit to the plant in August. U.S. officials were in touch with the company in weekly telephone calls to try to verify the safety and quality of the vaccines that were expected, he said.

Pierce also said federal spending on flu vaccine research and other programs had risen from about $47 million in 2001 to about $280 million this year. For the first time, he said, the government this year bought stockpiles of the vaccine -- 4.5 million doses.

Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt said the government could not compel U.S. manufacturers to produce vaccines, and said many had shied away from them because of liability risks. He said Kerry had voted against a 2003 measure that would have protected vaccine manufacturers from punitive damages for products approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

“John Kerry talks about increasing the supply of flu vaccines, but he was an obstacle to flu vaccine production,” Schmidt said, accusing him of “incredible hypocrisy.”

Kerry spokesman David Wade said the measure had little to do with vaccine production and would have amounted to a “giveaway to the big drug companies.”

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Times staff writer Nick Anderson contributed to this report.