High Vaccine Prices: Health at Risk
Vaccines are one of medicine’s most resounding successes, having slashed disease over the last century. However, in recent months what appears to be price gouging by vaccine manufacturers has forced public health officials nationwide to significantly scale back decades-old inoculation campaigns.
Last week, for example, state officials said they had been forced to cut by two-thirds the number of tetanus/diphtheria vaccines they offer to school-age children because the sole national manufacturer of the vaccine, Aventis Pasteur, quadrupled the price. And last fall a national distributor of flu vaccine, General Injectables & Vaccines, delayed its shipments to California, which had a deal to pay $17.99 per vial, but delivered shipments on time to states like Maine that had agreed to pay the full price of $39.
Up to 70,000 U.S. adults die yearly from vaccine-preventable illnesses, a study by the Institute of Medicine has found. The 20% of toddlers who do not receive the most critical vaccinations are shamefully concentrated in the poorest communities. For instance, the study found that while three-fourths of Los Angeles children receive basic vaccinations, fewer than half the children in East Los Angeles do.
Congress has asked the Government Accounting Office to investigate whether General Injectables violated its contractual obligations to states by distributing the flu vaccine on the basis of profit potential rather than public health needs.
Rep. Gary A. Condit (D-Ceres) plans to meet with Aventis officials today and with officials from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration Thursday to investigate whether Aventis’ sharp hike in the per-vial price of the tetanus vaccine--from $14.50 in 1999 to $62.21 this year--was driven solely by new manufacturing costs, as the company asserts, or by Aventis’ knowledge that its only competitor, Wyeth Lederle, had decided to stop making tetanus vaccines in 2000.
To stabilize vaccine supplies in the short term, Congress should invest more in the next five years to purchase vaccines and improve inoculation campaigns. To ensure that states aren’t price-gouged in the future, Congress should promptly pass HR 943, a newly introduced bill by Condit that would give the CDC funding and authority to assess the ability of the private and public sectors to produce, distribute and administer vaccines.
Congressional interest in improved vaccine monitoring mushroomed after a GAO report last year concluded that vaccines may be our nation’s key defense against a biological weapons attack.
As Washington begins a new battle against the threat of exotic bioweapons, it should not lose sight of the need to continue fighting much older battles--against stubborn but entirely predictable public health threats.
