Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
11
One of the most difficult things to explain to the public after a pandemic would be
why we weren't prepared, because there have been enough warnings.
260
Klaus Stohr, WHO
Influenza vaccines are especially disliked by drug companies because they are tricky to produce, become
obsolete after one season, and are subject to large fluctuations in demand. Moreover, the basic production
process has changed little since the days of Francis and Salk a half century ago, and the industry has failed
to invest in the faster and safer cell-culture technology that would eliminate the risk of contamination inher-
ent in using fertile chicken eggs.
261
Vaccine manufacturing in general is widely regarded as a broken-down
old railroad to be off-loaded at the first opportunity rather than repaired and modernized. Big Pharma, by
and large, has spurned the little biotech startups in San Diego, Austin, and Boston that have been searching
for capital to develop exciting new recombinant and genetically engineered vaccines. In terms of vaccine
development in general, the United States measures poorly even against tiny Cuba which, thanks to the
priority given to infectious and “poor people's” diseases, has become a world leader in creating state-of-
the-art vaccines for meningitis B,
Haemophilus influenzae, and
other important infections ignored by giant
drug companies in the United States.
262
Meanwhile, aging and poorly maintained vaccine production facilities have been plagued by poor qual-
ity control and indifferent management. In September 2000, for example, 12 percent of the influenza vac-
cine supply was lost when the FDA shut down Parkdale Pharmaceuticals' contaminated facility, which
never reopened; deliveries from Wyeth-Ayerst, which produced one-third of the national supply, were also
delayed because of quality problems (the company abandoned vaccine production two years later after a
mild flu season left millions of doses unsold).
263
By the winter of 2003-4—with the Institute of Medicine
sternly warning Washington that the country was still “poorly prepared” for a flu pandemic—only two cor-
porations were still making influenza vaccine for the U.S. market: French-owned Aventis-Pasteur with a
manufacturing complex in Swiftwater, Pennsylvania, and Bay Area-based Chiron, with a recently acquired
plant near Liverpool.
264
This was an extraordinary contrast to the situation in 1976, when
thirty-seven
companies in the United
States produced flu vaccine, or for that matter, to current policy in the UK, where the government retains
contracts with six major suppliers.
265
Although the GAO had warned HHS in May 2001 about the “fragil-
ity of the vaccine supply,” the Department “didn't display any comprehension of what the problem was and
what should be done about it.”
266
Even as it hyped the importance of “biosecurity,” the Bush administra-
tion in essence mortgaged the lives of tens of thousands of senior citizens, for whom annual influenza is a
life-threatening illness, by relying on vaccine production in just two plants—and one of them, it would turn
out, had an alarming record of poor quality control.
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