Swine Flu Vaccine Scarcity Stirs Anger in U.S. Cities

Oct. 28 (Bloomberg) -- San Diego health officials said the county depleted its main supply of swine flu vaccine today after receiving only 25 percent of the 411,000 doses anticipated for October, as reports of shortages nationwide mount.
New shipments may arrive “in the next week or two, we hope,” said Jose Alvarez, a spokesman for the San Diego County Health and Human Services Agency. From New York, where October deliveries fell short by 400,000 doses, to Dallas and Phoenix, which have postponed mass vaccinations, to San Francisco, where one family clinic is fielding 400 calls a day, local officials are being pressured by parents for swine flu vaccine as the death toll for children in the U.S. reached 95.
The U.S. received about 9 million more doses of H1N1 vaccine from drugmakers in the last week, bringing the total available for distribution to 23.2 million, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said today. The supply isn’t enough, Thomas Frieden, director of the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a call yesterday with reporters. Local officials and doctors agree.
“Some parents are very angry,” said Joanne Cox, associate chief of pediatrics at Children’s Hospital in Boston. “We have very high demand. The phones are ringing off the hook.”
Nicole Lurie, assistant secretary for preparedness and response at health and human services, said Oct. 23 that the U.S. won’t get the 195 million doses it had planned for by the end of the year because of production delays at two drugmakers and one manufacturer’s failure to gain regulatory approval for its product.
Vaccine Suppliers
GlaxoSmithKline Plc and AstraZeneca Plc, both based in London, Sanofi-Aventis SA of Paris, Novartis AG in Basel, Switzerland, and CSL Ltd. of Melbourne, Australia, provide the bulk of the U.S. supply. Sebelius said today that production of the vaccine is being “accelerated” and the reasons for the slow start have been fixed.
While the U.S. may receive 42 million doses from the drugmakers to distribute to states by mid-November, that is 8 million fewer than earlier U.S. estimates, Lurie said. Local health departments are already feeling the pinch.
San Diego received only 100,000 doses of the vaccine it was expecting this month, Alvarez said yesterday. About 16,500 doses were distributed through county clinics over the weekend, he said. The county ran out of vaccine delivered through injections today, and has limited supplies for pregnant women, said Tom Christensen, a spokesman, in a telephone interview today.
Parents Confused
Parents are getting mixed messages from schools and doctors offices, which are urging them to vaccinate kids when supplies often aren’t available, said one Boston-area mother.
“Do I want my kids to be vaccinated? Sure,” said Margaret Birchall, a mother of four kids ages 10 to 22 in Topsfield, Massachusetts. “But what do you do? You’re being told to be sure to get the vaccine, but then they don’t have it.”
Dallas County, Texas, canceled a mass vaccination effort planned for Oct. 24 because it didn’t have enough doses, said Zachary Thompson, director of the county’s Health and Human Services agency.
“We may get a lot of vaccine on the back end, in November or December, but our goal is to do mass vaccinations as early as possible,” Thompson said yesterday. News coverage has heightened awareness of the pandemic “and everybody is ready to take the vaccine,” he said.
Many Questions
About 400 people a day are calling East Bay Pediatrics, a physician practice that serves about 14,000 children in Berkeley and Orinda, California, east of San Francisco, said Mary Gilbert, a registered nurse. The pediatricians’ office received about 300 doses of the vaccine in mid-October, and the supply was gone in three days, Gilbert said.
“It’s very hit or miss as to when we get the product,” she said. “We just keep telling people to be patient. Most people are just scared from what they’re reading in the newspapers.”
Maricopa County, Arizona, which includes Phoenix, has received about a third of the vaccine supply it had anticipated by now, said Rebecca Sunenshine, an epidemiologist with the Department of Public Health. In total, the county expects to get about 250,000 doses, she said in a phone interview yesterday.
With temperatures in the high 80s, “we had tremendous lines” that lasted for hours over the weekend at pediatrician offices, pharmacies and clinics, Sunenshine said.
17,000 Vaccinations
The county vaccinated 17,000 people on Oct. 24, focusing on higher risk groups, she said. A series of mass immunization programs at schools has been postponed, she said.
New York City will get 800,000 doses of the vaccine by the end of this month, compared with the 1.2 million it expected, said Jessica Scaperotti, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. A vaccine program in schools started today with 125 elementary schools.
President Barack Obama declared swine flu a national emergency on Oct. 24. The disease is widespread across the country and accounted for 411 confirmed deaths and more than 8,200 hospitalizations from Aug. 30 to Oct. 17, the CDC said.
While H1N1 produces similar symptoms as seasonal flu, it is targeting a younger population and can lead to severe illness and death. The seasonal flu kills about 36,000 people a year in the U.S., though the majority of those deaths are in people older than age 80.
Children’s Deaths
Ninety-five children 17 years old or younger have died from confirmed swine flu since April 2009, more than the toll for a typical year of influenza, according to the CDC Web site.
A World Health Organization advisory panel is deliberating today whether one or two doses of the vaccine are needed to fight the virus. The U.S. and Australia have begun mass immunization programs based on a single-dose regimen, while Japan and the European Union are calling for two shots.
The vaccine will reach Hong Kong by the end of the year, about three months after an initial wave of cases peaked, a health official there said. China and Russia each have had four deaths from the H1N1 virus, news agencies reported today.
Chicago-based Aon Corp., the world’s largest insurance broker, is offering to cover companies against the risk of their offices being shut by the pandemic.
Concern that there are shortages is bound to boost demand from those afraid the product won’t be available in time to head off the disease, the CDC’s Frieden told reporters in his call yesterday.
About 11.3 million doses had been shipped to states as of Oct. 21, according to the CDC.
California received the most vaccine as of Oct. 21, at 1.3 million doses, according to the CDC’s Web site. Texas was next with 831,400, followed by New York, at 729,100. As of then, 14.1 million doses were available for ordering.
“Some of those early challenges have definitely been addressed,” Sebelius told reporters at a Washington news conference today. “The growth rate” of vaccine doses “is much more robust.”
Source bloomberg.com