U.S. A/H1N1 flu vaccine production "significantly increasing": health official

A high-ranking U.S. health official said Tuesday that more than 22 million doses of A/H1N1 flu vaccine were now available, with more doses coming in the next few weeks.

"As of today, we have 22.4 million doses available for shipment out directly to providers," Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said at a press briefing in the afternoon.

"We are beginning to see significant increases in vaccine production, vaccine distribution, and we do think it will get easier to find vaccine in the weeks to come," he added.

Last Wednesday, there were just 14 million doses on hand, despite initial predictions that as many as 120 million would be ready by mid-October.

The CDC later slashed that estimate to 45 million doses by mid-October, but the agency last week downsized the estimate to between 28 million and 30 million doses by the end of the month.

The A/H1N1 flu virus had to be grown in chicken eggs, and the yield had not been as high as was initially hoped, CDC officials explained.

"We wish we had better technology," Frieden said. "We wish we had a technology that could produce vaccine in weeks or months rather than the six to nine months that it takes given the current tried-and-true technology."

He recognized that other vaccine technologies were available, including cell-based vaccine and DNA technologies, but said that "they are all still experimental, and we are not using any of them."

He seemed to be more confident than he did last Friday when he said "what we have learned more in the last couple of weeks is that not only is the virus unpredictable, but vaccine production is much less predictable than we wish.

"We anticipate in the next week or so, there will be a significant increase in the perceive and real availability of vaccine as we go from the 10 to 15 million range to the 25 million range in terms of doses in the community," he told reporters.

"In a normal flu season, we vaccine about 100 million people over four months. So having more than 20 million doses out will provide some greater availability of vaccine for a lot of people," he explained.

Over time, CDC officials still expect to have as many as 225 million doses of the A/H1N1 vaccine if needed.

"The challenge at this point is to get what vaccine we have available to people, provide it to doctors' offices, schools, health care facilities and others as rapidly as possible," he said, advising local authorities not to reserve vaccine that they have available.

The CDC director promised that all states and their residents would enjoy equal opportunity in getting the vaccine.

"Our decision was to provide it on a per capita basis so each state has an equal likelihood of being able to get the vaccine," Frieden said. "Everyone has the same chance of getting the vaccine that's available."

The A/H1N1 pandemic, starting in a frightening burst of cases in certain parts of the country, has killed at least 1,000 Americans and caused at least mild illness in many millions of others.

The new virus diminished somewhat in the summer and then began increasing across the country as schools reopened two months ago.

Last Friday, President Obama declared the current pandemic a national emergency, following the CDC report that the A/H1N1 virus had spread throughout 46 U.S. States.

Frieden said it was really a preemptive move that gave the government and providers another tool to respond if they needed to deal with a large influx of patients.

"Some hospitals are challenged, and this is a preemptive or preparatory step," he said. "It's not a response to anything worse over the past few days or weeks."

But many U.S. health officials said it was hard to predict what would happen in the next few months.

Source: Xinhua