Health emergencies don't wait for Republicans to get back from vacations.

that we go all-out on new vaccine technologies. Right now it would be impossible to produce enough vaccine for many pandemic diseases in time to stop them before they killed many thousands of people, even in worst case hundreds of thousands -- in our nation alone.

We may be able to start trials on a "universal" flu vaccine in five years or so. That could be not nearly soon enough.

I remember in 2007 when all mention of the current flu epidemic in lay language disappeared from the media, including the web, only sites in highly technical language allowed. Meant to keep the public from panicking, but the nationwide censorship scared me a lot more than anything I'd read. Mercifully that strain turned out not to be what government epidemiologists were afraid it was.

THIS is the kind of focus we need in our president.