U.S. health officials tried to play down worries today that the country might be unprepared for pandemic swine flu come this fall. Vaccine producers are having trouble producing large amounts of the vaccine, and some experts predict other countries where vaccine is being produced may hoard it. But in a teleconference today, flu specialist Anne Schuchat of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta said she wasn't concerned.
Last week, the World Health organization reported that vaccine companies have obtained yields of the pandemic vaccine that are 50% to 75% lower than those for seasonal flu vaccine. They will try to improve on that with new vaccine strains, but even if they fail, U.S. pandemic planning has incorporated such setbacks, Schuchat told reporters. "For our planning assumptions, we're really on track and not concerned about meeting expectations," she said.
Today, an Associated Press story also suggested—as others have before it—that vaccine contracts might prove worthless if the countries where the vaccine is produced put their own population first and stop the product from being exported. (Most of the vaccine under contract by the United States is produced in Europe.) But Schuchat said that "the concerns that have been raised in the media have not been part of the dialogue" with manufacturers. "We haven't gotten information that makes us question the supply that we've been promised."
Plans are now taking shape for an elaborate testing program of the new H1N1 vaccines in the United States, funded in part by the National Institutes of Health and carried out at the Vaccine and Treatment Evaluation Units, a network of clinical centers around the country. "Manufacturers and NIH have been working together to plan these studies," chief scientist Jesse Goodman of the Food and Drug Administration said at the briefing today. "We are going to integrate them into an entire program so that we can answer as many questions as we can." The plans will be discussed on 23 July at a meeting of FDA's Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee; "we expect the initial trials to be starting very shortly," Goodman said.
The studies will also test vaccines with adjuvants. New, so-called oil-in-water adjuvants could make the vaccines more potent and might stretch the limited vaccine supply, but the compounds, already in use in Europe, have not received FDA approval. The U.S. could still use them, Schuchat said, presumably through a so-called emergency-use authorization instead of the normal licensure pathway. But it will do so only if the studies show the adjuvants to be "clearly beneficial and needed," Goodman said. Bruce Gellin, director of the National Vaccine Program Office, added that he has "high expectations" that the shots will work without adjuvants, as seasonal flu vaccines do.
Which groups should be targeted for the vaccine, and who should be first in line if the supply falls short, will be discussed on 29 July at a special meeting of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices in Atlanta.
—Martin Enserink
The problem is that no one listens including the media. Swine flu if it mutates to something equivalent to the Spanish flu of 1918/1919 (Spanish flu was a swine flu variant) has the same potential to kill humans on an unprecidented scale as it did 90 years ago. The problem is that both swine and avian are constantly mutating into something different. So by the time you have isolated and made a vaccine for the last one, it has changed again and circumvented the old guard and becomes useless. The problem is that this happens all the time and where drugs become irrelevant. The reason, it takes three months to develop an antidote and 6 months to mass produce and distribute it (a logistic nightmare in itself alone) and where on average therefore the vast majority have to wait 9 months for the cure. The problem is that even in slow coach travel times 1918, the Spanish flu which took between 20 and 100 million lives worldwide (there is no authoritive number but where it is estimated between the two), did its deadliest between week 14 and week 26, some 12 weeks at least before the masses would ever receive the drug cure presently. The 1918 killer flu had a very similar circumstance as today, a mild version before the deadly version arrived in the fall of 1918 with a vengeance. The only way that this deadly killer can be stopped therefore, if anyone is listening out there, is through a complete overhaul of modern farming and husbandry methods and to give considerable financial help to those who breed the livestock that we all eat. Basically as a single example, just stop them sleeping with the animals on cold nights in the tropics as this is how the flu virus passes from pig to chicken to man – eventually; and where the pig is the receptive incubator. Simply give them a heater and fuel, a much cheaper option that global suicide in both human and econmic terms as it will be. For the ‘Tropics’ are where some of the most eminent virologists and micribiologists in the field say is the place where the killer virus will emerge.The philosophy of not letting it happen in the first place. The drugs strategy is futile and it is only a matter of time before the killer strain that will kill literally 100s millions appears. The problem is that the vast profits of drug companies and the government's ignorance to the real facts will be the nails in all our coffins. The statistics and potential speak for themselves,
World Population 2 billion – 1920
Range of deaths
20mil/2billion = 1 in 100
100mil/2billion = 5 in 100
World Population now at 6.8 billion now equates to,
1 in 100 - 70 million min. today
5 in 100 - 340 million max. today
But, these figures could well be higher, as rapid world transit now makes for faster and wider transmission than in 1918.
I therefore say lets start now as I have been saying for the past three years and defeat this mass killer like no other by field work and not the futile drugs strategy that will do very little indeed to save lives. For presently we are all fooling ourselves.
If we put only £50 billion into this field work globally ( a small price for the human nightmare and financial melt-down that a global equivalent to Spanish flu would bring),we could eradicate the situation but where this £50 billion will no doubt end up alternatively in the pockets of the large pharmaceutical companies with little effect whatsoever. Get real everyone before it is basically too late and I am not joking – force governments to change their strategies from something that is impotent presently to something that will eradicate the problem at source. Common sense really but where currently no one seems to have any.
Worryingly also is the fact that as examples of other problems on the horizon is that the United States makes only 20 percent of its flu vaccines it uses and my country Britain makes zero percent of its flu vaccines, as all its flu vaccines are produced abroad. When a killer pandemic happens it will be hard for the producing countries to release any before their own people are serviced. Little known but true (Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota – 16.07.09).
I have been stopped from putting these comments and facts out by the media before. Let’s hope that minds are fully opened now and that the real solution can be heard and not just the bottom-line for drug companies!
Dr David Hill