Washington – President Bush summoned vaccine manufacturers to a White House meeting today, hoping to personally boost the rickety industry amid increasing fears of a worldwide outbreak of bird flu.
It’s the latest in a flurry of preparations for a possible pandemic after criticism of the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina.
This month, vaccine-maker Sanofi-Pasteur, a unit of Sanofi Aventis SA, begins the first mass production of a vaccine that promises to protect against bird flu, producing $100 million worth of inoculations for a government stockpile.
But it would take months to create a new vaccine from scratch if a different strain of bird flu than today’s, known as H5N1, emerges.
Even if the vaccine works, Sanofi is producing enough to protect anywhere from 2 million to 20 million people – depending on how much must be put into each dose – and it’s not clear when or where similar large stockpiles could be made.
The nation has only three main manufacturers of vaccine against the regular flu that circulates each winter.
On the agenda for today’s meeting is liability, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.
If healthy people suffer side effects from a vaccine, manufacturers can face huge lawsuits, one reason many companies have left the business in the past two decades.
Another reason is that vaccines simply aren’t very profitable, especially flu vaccine, which must be made fresh every winter to keep up with newly circulating strains.
“We cannot handle the threats we face today with a broken flu-vaccine system,” said Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., who with Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., introduced legislation Thursday that would, among other things, financially guarantee a market in return for more vaccine production.
