US sees 10 million more H1N1 vaccine doses this week

President Barack Obama on Friday expressed frustration about the slow pace of production of the vaccine, which has resulted in just 26.6 million doses as of Friday, far below earlier estimates of 40 million by the end of October.

Sebelius said those initial estimates were based on “overly optimistic” predictions by the five contracted vaccine makers for the US market -- MedImmune, a unit of AstraZeneca, Sanofi-Aventis, Australia’s CSL, GlaxoSmithKline and Novartis. But production was now increasing and vaccine doses were being shipped seven days a week, Sebelius told CNN.

“The good news is that we have, as of yesterday, 26.6 million doses out and around the country. We are expecting another 10 million doses this week,” Sebelius said. “So the vaccine is beginning to roll in larger volumes. And it’s being distributed as quickly as it comes off the line.” “It’s being shipped overnight. We’re getting it from producers seven days a week,” she added.

HHS initially estimated that 20 million doses would roll out every week, but the companies are currently producing only about 10 million doses a week. The latest count shows 114 children have been killed by the virus in the United States since April, during a time when there is usually virtually no influenza, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

CDC researchers estimated this week that as many as 5.7 million people in the United States have been infected so far, with at least 1,300 deaths. The flu has been reporting in 48 states, an unprecedented level.

David Axelrod, Obama’s senior adviser, told National Public Radio in an interview aired on Saturday that the administration “overpromised” the vaccine based on the companies’ assurances. But he said the problem was abating every day: “We believe that that is improving on a daily basis, and we’re going to have an ample supply in very short order.”

Sebelius told CNN there was now a good mix of the nasal vaccine and the nasal mist available after earlier shortages, and the government expected to make sufficient vaccine doses available “over the next several months.”

The United States still planned to participate in an 11-nation program to donate H1N1 vaccine to developing countries, but only after the priority population in the United States had been vaccinated, Sebelius said. “The first priority is to get the vaccine to the American people,” Sebelius said. “That’s always been the plan. It continues to be the plan.”

But she said vaccinations were also critical in developing countries and refugee camps, where hundreds of thousands of people could die as a result of the flu, Sebelius said.

People will fear flu vaccine ‘adverse events,’ study shows

Fear of adverse events such as miscarriages, rare neurological conditions and ordinary heart attacks will discourage some people from participating in mass vaccination efforts to fight swine flu, but public health experts said they could fight back with statistics. Vaccination against pandemic H1N1 is underway in the United States, Britain, Canada and China and will start in other countries soon. And many people will associate bad events with the vaccine, said Dr. Steven Black of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital in Ohio and colleagues. “Highly visible health conditions, such as Guillain-Barre syndrome, spontaneous abortion or even death will occur in coincident temporal association with novel influenza vaccination,” they wrote in the Lancet medical journal. So they calculated what might be expected anyway, even if there were no vaccination campaign.

“On the basis of the reviewed data, if a cohort of 10 million individuals was vaccinated in the UK, 21.5 cases of Guillain-Barre syndrome and 5.75 cases of sudden death would be expected to occur within 6 weeks of vaccination,” they wrote.

For every 1 million pregnant women vaccinated, 397 will have a miscarriage, known medically as a spontaneous abortion, within a day -- all unrelated to the vaccine, they said. “If millions of people are vaccinated then just by chance we can expect bad things to happen to some of them, whether it’s a diagnosis of autism or a miscarriage,” commented David Spiegelhalter, a specialist in risk understanding at Britain’s University of Cambridge. “By being ready with the expected numbers of chance cases, perhaps we can avoid over-reaction to sad, but coincidental, events. And why don’t we ever see a headline ‘Man wins lottery after flu jab’?” Global health officials have set up various systems for monitoring such adverse events to make sure the vaccine is not causing any particular health problems.

But they know many people will blame miscarriages or other health disasters on the vaccine. Washington Reuters