Millions of Smallpox Vaccine Doses Found

A pharmaceutical company has discovered 70 million to 90 million long-forgotten doses of smallpox vaccine in its freezers, instantly increasing the known U.S. inventory of the vaccine sixfold and ensuring the nation an adequate supply in the event of a bioterrorist attack, according to government sources familiar with the find.

The immediate impact of the discovery is to buy time for the federal government and its pharmaceutical contractors, which together have been racing to produce tens of millions of smallpox vaccine doses as part of the new biodefense initiative. Companies will be able use that cushion of time to fine-tune some of the new vaccine candidates under development, instead of rushing effective but perhaps less-than-perfect vaccines into production as an emergency stopgap measure.

“It’s a great insurance policy,” said D.A. Henderson, director of the newly created federal Office of Health Preparedness.

The liquid vaccine doses were produced by Aventis Pasteur of Lyon, France, which has its U.S. operations in Swiftwater, Pa. The vaccine has been stored in freezers since it was made decades ago, sources said. It remained unclear why its existence had gone undiscovered for so long, exactly when it was discovered or by whom.

Sources said the company is negotiating with the Department of Health and Human Services with the goal of giving the U.S. government access to the supply. Among the issues to be worked out are how much money, if any, would change hands in the transaction, and the extent to which the company may be relieved of liability should problems with the vaccine arise.

Calls to Aventis were referred to HHS, which volunteered few details.

“There are legal things that still need to be finalized,” said HHS spokesman Bill Hall. HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson hopes to settle the deal before next week, Hall said. “Until then, our hands are tied.”

A global vaccination effort rid the world of naturally occurring smallpox in 1977, after which the vaccine fell out of production. But a few vials of smallpox viruses were saved in the United States and the Soviet Union. Some experts fear that small amounts of the highly infectious, often fatal agent--which can be expanded with relative ease in a laboratory--may have fallen into terrorist hands.

The possibility that smallpox might reemerge as an agent of terror recently inspired U.S. health officials to take stock of existing vaccine supplies. That inventory concluded that the nation has about 15.4 million doses--barely enough to deal with an attack on a major city or two.