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News-Sentinel.com Your Town. Your Voice.
Opening Arguments

Sorely screwed

Here's a little refreshing honesty from a public official. Indiana has been receiving a lot more per capita doses of H1N1 vaccine than Kentucky, which means Indiana ordered its supplies much earlier and asked for more:

 When asked about Kentucky's slow rate of ordering and receiving the vaccine, Gwenda Bond, a spokeswoman for the Kentucky Department for Public Health stated “We don't have a good answer for that.”

That's not exactly, "We screwed up," but it's probably as close as a government worker can come.

The story also had an interesting use of "sorely" as an intesifier in the opening sentence. "Kentucky lags sorely behind Indiana in reference to receiving their allocated H1N1 vaccines." You usually hear the word as ad adverb modifying a verb form, i.e. "sorely missed," "sorely tempted," "sorely lacking," but adverbs can modify adjectives, too. "In reference to" is pretty awkward, though.

Comments

littlejohn
Mon, 10/26/2009 - 4:43pm

Have you seen the article on flu vaccines in the current Atlantic Monthly? It has me wondering about the value of the shots.
I'm certainly not in the camp with Bill Maher, Jenny McCarthy and her chucklehead boyfriend about contaminants, autism and so forth, but the flu vaccine has apparently never been shown to work.
People who get the vaccination, according to the Atlantic article, are far less likely to die from flu, but they also are far less like to die from anything, including falling down the stairs. The group that gets the vaccine, after all, is self-selecting.
The hypothesis is that people who bother to get the vaccination are the same people who eat healthy stuff, avoid smoking, jog, drive sober and generally live safer lives. The flu shot may not be doing much of anything.
But with that said, I'm getting H1N1 vaccine as soon as possible. I assume it can't hurt.
As you may have heard, the H1N1 virus is beginning to mutate to the point it can infect robots. It's called R2D2.

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