When Will That Flu Vaccine Be Ready?
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May 22, 2009 by fluoutbreak
Despite recent news report to the contrary, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) assures ScienceInsider that efforts to make a vaccine against the virus causing the swine flu outbreak have not met unexpected delays.
Confusion about the vaccine timeline stems from a report from the World Health Organization (WHO) yesterday, which recounted a meeting held by a scientific working group that looked closely at the production issues. The advisory working group concluded that manufacturers would not be able to begin “large-scale production” of a vaccine against the novel H1N1 virus until mid-July. The report did not describe these as delays, but many media accounts did, noting that WHO’s Marie-Paule Kieny, director of WHO’s initiative for vaccine research, earlier predicted that production could begin 2 months earlier and suggested that a vaccine might be ready as early as September.
Tom Skinner, a spokesperson for CDC, assured ScienceInsider that everything is on track. “We’re hopeful we can have a vaccine ready by late fall; however, we know that the manufacturing process is complicated, and we need to be prepared in case we run into glitches with production of the vaccine,” says Skinner. The timing, of course, depends on the specific steps in the manufacturing process, and CDC and the WHO working group appear to have different estimates on some key points.
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