Purchase Vaccines in Bulk, States Are Urged

California and other states could save millions of dollars by buying vaccines in bulk and distributing them to physicians who treat children eligible for Medicaid, the Children’s Defense Fund, an advocacy group, said Monday.

In a report released in Los Angeles, the Washington-based organization also advocated a universal distribution system in which “all the necessary vaccines for American children could be purchased by the Centers for Disease Control and distributed free of charge to all health-care providers in the country.”

Such a distribution system would allow states and the federal government, which together purchase more than half of all vaccines, to take advantage of bulk prices and improve the availability of vaccines, the report said.

California already purchases large quantities of vaccines at bulk rates through the CDC, said Dr. George Rutherford, chief of the infectious disease branch of the state Department of Health Services. Most of these vaccines are given to county health departments, which make some available to not-for-profit community-based clinics.

The Children’s Defense Fund criticized California and 29 other states that do not take advantage of bulk purchase rates for their Medicaid programs, which provide medical care to many poor children.

In recent years, California came through a serious epidemic of measles, a vaccine-preventable disease. There were more than 12,000 measles cases in the state in 1990, including 682 in Orange County, but only about 2,000 statewide in 1991.