Flu Vaccine: Dangerous Delays
Vaccines are the simplest, most cost-effective and potent lifesaving tool in America’s medical arsenal, and the flu vaccine is among the most essential, offering protection against a disease that still contributes to 20,000 deaths and 110,000 hospitalizations in the United States each year. That is why this year’s unprecedented delays in distributing flu vaccines, particularly to the vulnerable elderly and chronically ill, are so dangerous.
There is plenty of blame to go around. Federal officials, for one, failed to ask vaccine distributors to set aside early shipments for high-risk populations back in June when they first concluded that there would be major delays. Now, however, the critical spotlight should focus on the distributors themselves, for their general failure to take need into account.
Doctors who serve the elderly and the chronically ill in public and private clinics say they still have received little or no vaccine. Meanwhile, the orders of some corporations with generally healthy employees and companies mounting flu shot campaigns at retail locations have been filled.
Officials at California’s Department of Health Services, which supplies vaccines to county-based clinics, are particularly frustrated over the failure of their distributor, General Injectables and Vaccines, to fill their order for 700,000 flu vaccine doses. GIV spokeswoman Susan Vassallo said no special priority is being given to public agencies or those with high-risk patients.
Public health officials charge that the reason is the higher prices that private doctors are willing to pay for the scarce vaccine. Though California paid GIV $17 per 10-dose vial earlier this year, some distributors are now asking for $150 a vial. Vaccine distributors should realize that while they may gain in the short term by gouging, they may in the end punish only themselves.
A drumbeat for federal regulation of vaccine distribution began earlier this year when the Institute of Medicine, a division of the National Academy of Sciences, released a report concluding that the current “public health infrastructure that supports the national immunization system is fragile and unstable” and recommending that the federal government take over what are now scattered state attempts to “coordinate, support, and document immunization efforts.”
The drumbeat picked up Monday when the Government Accounting Office released a report concluding that the United States is unprepared to protect its citizens against a major outbreak like the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed half a million Americans.
The GAO report concluded with a call for a major increase in immunization rates for all Americans to prevent a future flu pandemic. However, as this year’s delays make clear, such an expansion will be possible only with a major overhaul of the present, medically irresponsible system.
