Feds funding war on phony disease
Will Rogers said that the only difference between death and taxes is that death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets.
And if we're looking for a new national slogan, that's got my vote.
How long are you going to keep breaking your back while Uncle Sam breaks the bank? He's skimming 25 cents off every dollar you earn, with the same tired nonsense about how we need to arm our troops... educate our children... and keep enough cops on the street.
And if you think that's where the shopping list ends, I have a taxpayer-funded bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you. Because the truth is, if you REALLY knew what our government was spending your cash on, you'd never fork a red cent over to the feds again.
Case in point, right now our government is pumping millions of your dollars into a shadowy agency you've never heard of -- and you'd better believe your local Congressman never mentions it in his stump speech.
This agency isn't taking down Mexican drug cartels or fighting the global war on terror -- it's developing cures for pandemics that don't exist.
In the most insane waste of taxpayer dollars since we used psychics to spy on the Soviets, Uncle Sam is pumping more than $400 million a year into the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA). And BARDA's entire mission seems to be to hand out grants to Big Pharma for drugs you'll never use, to treat diseases you'll never catch.
In fact, Novartis just used a BARDA grant to develop a vaccine for H7N9 bird flu -- a vaccine our government could start stockpiling immediately unless you and I stop them.
Novartis says its new wonder vaccine works like a charm -- but the truth is, we'll never know. That's because in the history of mankind, no bird flu has EVER caused a pandemic. You have a better chance of being abducted by aliens than dying during some bird flu apocalypse.
This isn't some emerging health threat. It's a taxpayer-funded boondoggle. Even in China, the birthplace of H7N9, the virus is spreading slower than frozen peanut butter. It's affected fewer than 150 people in a nation of 1.3 billion, and 80% of those folks survived.
Yet Uncle Sam is STILL getting ready to stockpile H7N9 vaccine just WEEKS after an independent report found he wasted BILLIONS storing up Tamiflu.
It's time to end the nonsense -- and get BARDA's budget off of the federal shopping list forever. Because at the end of the day, you don't have a snowball's chance in hell of catching H7N9 -- but Uncle Sam is going to bill you for the cure anyway.