New York Senator Hillary Clinton is blasting the Bush administration for the flu vaccine shortage, despite her own role in causing the crisis with her health care reforms in the 1990s.

"They're more interested in tax cuts for the rich than for flu shots for everyone who needs them," Clinton railed Monday afternoon at a press conference at New York's Ryan/Chelsea-Clinton Community Health Center.

"This administration has their priorities wrong," she added. "And we've really paid a big price for their negligence." But according to the Wall Street Journal, though Hillarycare as a whole crashed and burned in 1994, the former first lady was able to change the laws governing the manufacture of vaccines.

And the results have been disastrous.

During last fall's flu vaccine shortage, the Journal noted:

"The reason for today's shortage - as well as seven previous preventive vaccine shortages since 2000 - is that there are just five vaccine makers. This lack of suppliers is partly thanks to Hillary Clinton, who as first lady turned government into the majority buyer of vaccines and pushed prices so low as to make business unsustainable."

In July 2003 the Journal noted that the problem goes back to 1993, when Mrs. Clinton's "Vaccines for Children Program" was first implemented.

The vaccine crusade was being pushed at the time by Mrs. Clinton's Children's Defense Fund mentor Marian Wright Edelman - even though U.S. child vaccination rates in the early 1990s were considered relatively high by medical experts.

But that didn't stop Senator Clinton and her "reformers." She pressured Congress to back her plan in a bid to make vaccines more available to poor, uninsured and underinsured children. In the process she turned the government into the major purchaser and distributor of vaccines.

Not only did Senator Clinton's reform fail to result in any noticeable increase in childhood vaccination rates, it managed to drive down financial incentives for private companies to develop and produce vaccines.

A year after the Journal's report on Senator Clinton's crusade, the number of manufactures producing flu vaccine has declined to just two, and Chiron had to destroy their 2004 supply because of problems at their UK plant.

The current 2004 U.S. flu shot supply is 58 million doses, supplied by only one manfacturer, Aventis. Last year, 0.012% of the U.S. population died from influenza.