Washington – President Bush met for about 40 minutes Friday with chief executives of vaccine and pharmaceutical manufacturers, emphasizing to them the importance he places on ramping up medical protections against pandemic flu and discussing strategies for increasing the global capacity for vaccine production, White House and other officials said.
The conversation was the latest in a series of meetings between drug-company executives and federal health officials, Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt told reporters Friday.
“There’s no secret about the fact that our vaccine manufacturing capacity domestically is not what we need it to be,” Leavitt said. “We’ve got to improve in that area.”
The executives, from Chiron, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Sanofi-Aventis, Wyeth and MedImmune, said little as they left the White House. But Sanofi’s chief executive, David Williams, said: “We’re very encouraged. We think a national plan is going to come into place.”
Anthony Fauci, chief of infectious diseases at the National Institutes of Health, has been involved in several flu-related briefings with the president and others in recent weeks, including Friday’s. He said that although the current impetus comes from the avian-flu pandemic that scientists fear is now brewing in Southeast Asia, the key to being able to produce a pandemic vaccine on short notice is to have a robust vaccine production infrastructure in place.
“The issue is how do we build a sustainable capacity so we’re not always in crisis mode,” Fauci said.
To accomplish that, he said, liability issues must be addressed.
Currently, federal vaccine liability protections apply only to routine childhood vaccines.
Also key will be issues of profitability, since the domestic market for ordinary flu vaccines is currently too small to attract companies beholden to shareholders.
One way to get over the profit hurdle, Fauci said, is to create policies and a “national ethic” in which greater numbers of people take advantage of the benefits of getting vaccinated against flu annually.
In the short term, that would protect more people each winter, he said, and in the longer term, it would keep the industry healthy and primed for an emergency.
The chief executives who met with Bush were precluded by antitrust laws from discussing in one room the details of their evolving strategies, but each company will hone its approaches in one-on-one meetings with federal officials, Leavitt said.
Leavitt, who leaves Saturday on a 10-day trip to Asia to build political bridges and scientific collaborations with health officials in the region, emphasized that vaccines are just one part of a larger pandemic strategy that includes antiviral drugs, animal health surveillance and public-health measures.
Although he said that the multipronged process is going well and promised that a national pandemic preparedness plan is on the brink of being released, several Democratic senators said Friday that the administration’s response to the threat of avian flu has been sluggish.
In a letter to Leavitt, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and five other Democrats emphasized that the government has stockpiled relatively small amounts of the antiviral drug Tamiflu.
