Production of H1N1 vaccine lags far behind US demand

SWIFTWATER, Pa. (AP) — The federal government originally promised 120 million doses of H1N1-flu vaccine by now. Only 13 million have come through.

As nervous Americans clamor for the vaccine, production is running several weeks behind schedule, and health officials blame the pressure on pharmaceutical companies to crank it out along with the ordinary flu vaccine, and a slow and antiquated process that relies on millions of chicken eggs.

There have been other bottlenecks, too: Factories that put the precious liquid into syringes have become backed up. And the government itself ran into a delay in developing the tests required to assess each batch before it is cleared for use.

What effect the delays will have on the course of the outbreak is unclear, in part because scientists cannot say with any certainty just how dangerous the virus is, how easily it spreads, or whether it will mutate into a more lethal form.

Since April, swine flu has killed more than 800 people in the U.S., including 86 children, 39 of them in the past month and a half, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than half of all hospitalizations since the beginning of September were people 24 and under.

“We’re in this race against the virus, and only Mother Nature knows how many cases are going to occur over the next six to 10 weeks,” said Michael Osterholm, a vaccine expert at the University of Minnesota.

In the meantime, many states have had to postpone mass vaccinations. Clinics around the country that managed to obtain doses of the vaccine have been swamped. And doctors are getting bombarded with calls from worried and angry parents.

“Nobody has it,” said AnnMarie O’Connor, who waited more than four hours for the vaccine in Rockville, Md., standing in line with her two young children and about 1,000 other people. Health officials “said the shots would be here in early October. But where are they?”

Federal officials counsel patience, saying that eventually there should be enough of both vaccines for everyone who wants them.

“We wish we had better ways to produce vaccines perfectly predictably, but this is how influenza vaccine production often goes,” Dr. Anne Schuchat, who heads the CDC’s immunization and respiratory disease section, said last week.

The delays have led to renewed demands for a quicker, more reliable way of producing vaccines than the chicken-egg method, which is 50-year-old technology and involves injecting the virus into eggs and allowing it to feed on the nutrients in the egg white.

Federal officials initially projected that as many as 120 million doses of the vaccine would be ready to dispense by mid-October. They later reduced their estimate to 45 million. As of Tuesday, only 12.8 million were available. (Health officials say a single dose will protect adults, while children under 10 will need two doses.)