swine flu

During the summer, when swine flu was not yet a widespread reality in the United States, giant retailer Wal-Mart made the news for being in talks with the government about possibly distributing the swine flu vaccine through its extensive network of stores.
But now the swine flu has Wal-Mart under scrutiny for a very different reason: [...]

The Obama administration’s announcement last week that it was making a slight shift on immigration policy, to target employers who hire illegal workers rather than the workers themselves, is a good move but not nearly good enough, The New York Times wrote in a powerful Sunday editorial.
At the end of April, the Department of Homeland [...]

Since bloggers at Grist and Biosurveillance first starting pointing to a subsidiary of the U.S. pork producer Smithfield Foods as a possible source of the swine flu everyone’s now so panicked about, the mainstream media has started picking up on the story.
Although Smithfield is still denying that its hogs could possibly have been the source [...]

Whether it’s a struggling economy or the threat of a pandemic, immigration reform is debated in the context of problems at hand.

Breaking news from The Washington Post:
A member of the security advance team for President Obama’s recent trip to Mexico is suspected of having contracted the swine flu, a senior White House official says.

United Nations food inspectors are going to Mexico to investigate reports that industrial pig farms were the source of the swine flu outbreak, the BBC reports.
As I wrote yesterday, based on some excellent reporting in Grist and elsewhere, local residents in La Gloria, Mexico, where the swine flu outbreak may have originated, suspect that the [...]

Lawmakers and immigration restrictionists advocating closure of the border with Mexico to prevent the spread of swine flu into the United States may want to stop and listen to what Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy and a longtime adviser to the U.S. government on public [...]

It was the perfect opportunity for Maricopa County, Ariz. Sheriff Joe Arpaio. After all, it’s been more than a month since he was in the national spotlight when the federal government announced that it was investigating his office in Maricopa County for racial profiling and other civil rights abuses stemming from his eagerness to crack [...]

If Smithfield Foods, which I wrote about in an earlier post, rang a bell, it may be because the company has recently gotten some bad press for its troubled labor relations. The problems are heating up with the company’s latest announcement that it’s closing six plants and cutting 1,800 jobs.

It was just a matter of time, but right-wing bloggers, restrictionist immigration groups and now even some politicians are blaming illegal immigrants and the government’s failure to keep them out for the swine flu pandemic.
Michelle Malkin writes, “hey maybe we’ll finally get serious about borders now,” adding that she’s “blogged for years about the spread [...]