Breathless: FDA Bans Asthma Medication

Remember when Barack Obama — with the dignity and off-prompter grace, evincing deep understanding of the issues and the eloquence for which he is fawned over by the media — offered this gem:

Everybody knows that it makes no sense that you send a kid to the emergency room for a treatable illness like asthma, they end up taking up a hospital bed, it costs, when, if you, they just gave, you gave them treatment early and they got some treatment, and a, a breathalyzer, or inhalator, not a breathalyzer. (crowd laughing) I haven’t had much sleep in the last 48 hours.

Here he was promoting his health care takeover, though he and his also invoke children with asthma to push his global warming, anti-energy agenda — asthma being on the rise as emissions from cars and coal-fired power plants dramatically declined; obviously emissions from coal-fired electricity and cars air pollution must be the culprit. Or something. Expect to see a few in the debt-ceiling fight.

Well, things do get more confused with his own administration guilty of escalating a war on these breathalyzers or inhalators or gassificationators. You see, the best and cheapest inhalers have been phased out because their propellants are Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), substances targeted as ozone depleting substances. Replaced with extraordinarily powerful greenhouse gases, incidentally. Necessitating a…war on coal-fired electricity. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Anyway, regardless of what one believes about ozone depletion, CFCs from inhalers were a trivial contributor and should have been permanently exempted from these regimes until something just as good and just as affordable came along. They weren’t, and it hasn’t. Look, a squirrel…er…a coal-fired power plant providing reliable electricity to drive our economy more cleanly than ever imagined. Attack!

So, yes, this was a war begun and also waged with asinine rigidity by Obama’s predecessors. But never quite so cynically. First, see this from Obama’s FDA:

The only over-the-counter asthma inhaler sold in the United States will no longer be available next year as part of an international agreement to stop the use of substances that damage the environment.

Primatene Mist (epinephrine) is approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the temporary relief of occasional symptoms of mild asthma. FDA urges those who use Primatene Mist to see a health care professional soon to switch to another asthma medicine.

Primatene Mist inhalers are being discontinued because they use chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) as a propellant (spray) to move the medicine out of the inhaler so patients can breathe the medicine into their lungs.

Then, as no Leftist idea is complete without a dash of self-contradicting demagoguery, see the poster below sent to me from someone within EPA. Obama’s left hand is at the same time invoking the same kids the far-left hand is endangering. See the young lady with a less effective inhaler, the kind that Obama and his EPA promiscuously and dishonestly insist are increasingly needed thanks to pollution they courageously battle in the face of others less sensitive to the needs of asthmatics. Really.

Polar bears. Asthmatic kids. Seniors in a wheelchair near a dock or a cliff just begging to be pushed off by some political opponent. All mere props to these people in their headlong rush to bow and scrape before the crowd of statists, anti-technology green movement and other winners that constitute the modern political Left. But, hey. Think of the children.