PSoTD

Good catch by Cosmic Iguana.

From Asia Times:

In the same grim spirit, the British media revealed that officials were scouring the country for suitable sites for mass mortuaries, based on official fears that avian flu could kill as many as 700,000 Britons. The Blair government is already conducting emergency simulations of a pandemic outbreak ("Operation Arctic Sea") and is reported to have readied "Cobra" - a cabinet-level working group that coordinates government responses to national emergencies, like the recent London bombings, from a secret war room in Whitehall - to deal with an avian flu crisis.

Little of this Churchillian resolve is apparent in Washington. Although a sense of extreme urgency is evident in the National Institutes of Health, where the czar for pandemic planning, Dr Anthony Fauci, warns of "the mother of all emerging infections", the White House has seemed even less perturbed by migrating plagues than by wanton carnage in Iraq.

As the president was packing for his long holiday in Texas, the Trust for America's Health was warning that domestic preparations for a pandemic lagged far behind the energetic measures being undertaken in Britain and Canada, and that the administration had failed "to establish a cohesive, rapid and transparent US pandemic strategy".

That increasingly independent operator, Senate majority leader Bill Frist, had already criticized the administration in an extraordinary (and under-reported) speech at Harvard at the beginning of June. Referring to Washington's failure to stockpile an adequate supply of the crucial antiviral oseltamivir (or Tamiflu), Frist sarcastically noted that "to acquire more anti-viral agent, we would need to get in line behind Britain and France and Canada and others who have tens of millions of doses on order".