The USA can only make @20% of the vaccines needed due to lawsuits over faulty vaccines. I thought at the time that it was foolish that they weren’t protected. Now we have to depend on other countries to produce the vaccines needed.
LONDON — An ugly scramble is brewing over the swine flu vaccine — and when it becomes available, Britain, the United States and other nations could find that the contracts they signed with pharmaceutical companies are easily broken.
Experts warn that during a global epidemic, which the world is in now, governments may be under tremendous pressure to protect their own citizens first before allowing companies to ship doses of vaccine out of the country.
That does not bode well for many countries, including the United States, which makes only 20 percent of the flu vaccines it uses, or Britain, where all of its flu vaccines are produced abroad.
“This isn’t rocket science,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “If there is severe disease, countries will want to hang onto the vaccine for their own citizens.”
Experts say politicians would not be able to withstand the pressure.
“The consequences of shipping vaccine to another country when your own people don’t have it would be devastating,” added David Fedson, a retired vaccine industry executive.
About 70 percent of the world’s flu vaccines are made in Europe, and only a handful of countries are self-sufficient in vaccines. The U.S. has limited flu vaccine facilities, and because factories can’t be built overnight, there is no quick fix to boost vaccine supplies. Read the rest here.
There are just four major vaccine manufacturers in the world today, and only two in the United States (3). There were four times that number only 20 years ago. There are many small new research and development companies backed by venture capital and devoted to vaccine development. Many are working on anticancer vaccines for which market forces may be enough to keep them in production. However, good products developed by these startups to combat infectious diseases often do not come to market because of the very large costs of testing in pilot studies and in manufacturing. Currently, the United States has a single licensed anthrax vaccine product, manufactured by a single plant. Because the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had identified problems in the manufacturing process during regular inspections, the plant was closed for renovations in 1998, and to date, no new lots of anthrax vaccine have yet been cleared for release.
Damn.
