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Wicked Chinchilla 10/27/2009 10:38:58 AM

Frankly all of you are completely incorrect in why it has taken 6 months for the H1N1 vaccine to come along. Its not globalization, evil corporate greed, greedy trial lawyers. Its basic freaking biology.

We are very, very good at producing flu vaccine. We do it twice a year, every year. H1N1 uses the same tried and true tech and procedures, they just swapped out the content with the necessary strain and, voila, theres your vaccine.

The problem is, it takes six damn months to ramp this stuff up. Here is why:

1) You can't just decide "ok, we are going to make a vaccine now." and throw any old virus in there. You have to run serological studies of the strains you have (which you get from patients) against samples that are sent in. To get a more effective vaccine you have to actually wait a bit and make sure that the vaccine you are creating will be effective against what your trying to vaccinate. The bi-annual vaccines use a bunch of statistics based on circulation trends to figure out which strains will be dominant and make an educated guess. Thats why some years the vaccine is better than others: sometimes the model is correct, sometimes its less so.

Even though the swine flu is H1N1 there can easily be several sub-types of it. Thus, you couldnt just take the first kid who coughed and use his virus. You had to wait. Lets call that delay #1. This part is handled by the Government.

2) Once you figure out the virus you want you then have to grow it up. Vaccines are composed of killed virus. In order to kill it, you have to make it. This is the second bottleneck. Growing this up takes a good long time because it must be done in chicken eggs. The reason why you use chicken eggs instead of tissue culture is because there is not a tissue culture type that has been approved for use in humans. When I was in flu two years back there were always rumors of people working on a tissue culture alternative in vaccine production but nothing seems to ever materialize. The production phase is handled by the companies.

The standard time frame for typical vaccine production is 6 months from our decision of what flu subtypes go into it until it goes out for distribution. Analysis to determine what strains go into it take about 6 months prior to the "vaccine decision." If you work in flu, you are ALWAYS working your ass off. Since H1N1 has only been around for 6 months thats a rather good time frame. Especially because the standard flu vaccines are still being produced.

Well short of being incompetant the Feds have done an excellent job of responding to this, getting a response organized, and at trying to release good, timely information. The response has been measured, reasonable, and every move well founded and thought out. The only people screaming about this from the hilltops are the news networks craving ever higher ratings.

Flu and the government response to it is a good argument FOR government healthcare, rather than against it.

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Wicked Chinchilla 10/27/2009 11:24:06 AM

Oh, and one more thing. If the vaccine is available to you, GET IT. If you listen to any of this anti-vaxxer bullshit thats tossed around you are a complete idiot. As someone who has worked on vaccines, studied vaccines, knows immunology, and whose very life DEPENDS ON FRACKING VACCINES, they work extremely well, they are cheap, and they are devoid of any serious side effects the vast extreme majority of the time.

/rant off.

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eldnah 10/27/2009 12:23:42 PM

/rant off.

Agree with most of what WC says, especially Get the Vaccine. Certainly having to produce the seasonal flu vaccine variant impinged upon H1N1 vaccine production but the fact that US companies were driven out of the market has significantly limited world wide production capacity. There is an article in today's WaPo that speaks to the issue with a comment from a spokesperson for the vaccine manufacturers who are listed and are Sanofi (French), Glaxo Smith Kline (UK), Novartis (Swiss), MedImmune-AstraZeneca (UK & Sweden) and CSL (Australian). Not a significant American firm in the group.

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Nanheyangrouchuan 10/27/2009 12:28:07 PM

I love how Libs like Nan try to have it both ways. On one hand he blames the inavailability of H1N1 vaccinations on globalization and international outsourcing, but can then with a seemingly straight face defends some of the outrageous lawsuits that have forced the same outsourcing he condemns.

Unfortunately medical research requires a lot of trial and error. You can run all the computer simulations you want, and can even test drugs on rats and monkeys (at least for now), but the only true test of a drug is what happens when it is finally given to humans. Unfortunately, sometimes human patients will react badly to the drug and some will die. That is sad, but it is inevitable, and I doubt you will ever find a drug that is 100% effective for everyone and 100% safe. The comeback to this is usually, "How would you feel if it was your child, mother/father, brother/sister, wife/husband, etc.?" Well, I would feel awful and would want changes to make sure it doesn't happen to anyone else, but I also understand that human beings are fragile and that nobody gets out of life alive. Pharmaceutical companies should be held responsible for the products they produce, but court judgements in the hundreds of millions of dollars are an abuse of the system and prevent the development of life saving vaccines and medications.

Being able to pay lab techs chump wages, work them into the ground and no pollution regulations is a bigger incentive for outsourcing.

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Nanheyangrouchuan 10/27/2009 12:31:23 PM

/rant off.

The only reason I have stopped with yearly vaccines is that my immune system seemed to become dependent on them. I had to take the vaccine in the military and I did it for the first two years of undergrad school. I stopped one year and was floored for about a week. Since then, I get a mildly unpleasant bug but I can still get around and don't feel like I was hit by a car.

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Wicked Chinchilla 10/27/2009 1:45:29 PM

/rant off.

That is actually a legitimate reason not to get a vaccine. Everyones immune system is different and I understand that. Now if you had said you were worried about Thimerosol I would have been sorely tempted to shoot you :).

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sentinel28a 10/27/2009 2:16:18 PM

Paying lab techs lousy wages...excuse me while I laugh my ass off. They make a hell of a lot more money than I do as a teacher.

I'm also trying to remember where in the Constitution it says "You must work for a corporation who treats you like [s--t], rather than quit and find a corporation that treats you well."

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Wicked Chinchilla 10/28/2009 10:16:10 AM

Most Lab TECHS in the states make absolute dick. You max out at around mid 30ish. The average is under 30k. If you want to make money, don't be a tech. Some make more, but they are senior techs who have been around a while or they have some sort of rare speciality or unique skill. That could be BSL-4 biocontainment experience, EM experience/knowledge, some of the more exotic or rare diseases or bugs, or have a really, really good reputation.

I would highly doubt the avg. tech makes more than the avg. teacher and guarantee you techs dont make a lot more than teachers.

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Nanheyangrouchuan 10/28/2009 11:27:36 AM

Lab techs in developing countries don't do that well either. Working in clean, air conditioned facilities is quite far leap ahead of most of their contemporaries, but the pay still sucks and QC is notoriously bad, rejected product costs their employer money and there are lots of people waiting to take their jobs who won't have so many quality concerns.

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sentinel28a 10/29/2009 3:01:55 PM

I stand corrected, then. Still not a reason to throw out the baby with the bath water.

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