My UM RWJ colleague Hans Noel alerts me to the bizarre claim by the Daily Beast’s Kent Sepkowitz that President Obama politicized the H1N1 “swine flu”:

Now that Obama has formally declared swine flu a national emergency, he has moved the virus from the realm of public health into the too familiar and greedy world of politics. Rather than hearing those quaint details about how to cover a cough or watching local shmokel not-ready-for-TV doctors say whether to go to the ER, we now will get the standard he says-she says spouting off…

Instead we’re focusing on the chess match, the eternal micro-discussion of what everything really means: whether Obama is playing it up now to gin up support for his health-care initiative; whether the Republicans should stand up against something as flagrantly pinko as universal vaccination; what the cost in votes and press might be of standing here or moving there. The declaration of an official national emergency has reduced the H1N1 epidemic to something like the aftermath of a grim tornado—the president choppering in, a governor in a fleece coat and hardhat, a few lost souls picking through the rubble, some cute kids wearing PJs wandering in the bright daylight.

I hate to break it to Sepkowitz, but H1N1 was politicized long ago. In addition, Obama’s declaration, while dramatic-sounding, was actually a fairly mundane bureaucratic maneuver. Declaring a national emergency allows the adminstration to waive federal requirements that could hamper hospitals’ ability to respond to the pandemic. It is unfortunate that the H1N1 debate has become so politicized, but Sepkowitz is wrong to blame Obama for what’s happened.