Bird Flu Vaccine Substitute “Better Than Nothing”
03:50 PM, February 28th 2007
by Moni Constantinescu
A Food and Drug Administration advisory panel urges the approval of the first bird flu vaccine: safe, not enough, but “better than nothing.”
The fright of being faced with a flu pandemic has led federal health advisers to vote for an experimental bird flu vaccine that could be used if worst came to worst and serious measures were needed.
The vaccine is considered a temporary solution, until better, more effective ones are developed.
“I hope we never have to use it,” Dr. Melinda Wharton said, a panel member and deputy director of the national immunization program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “But this is the vaccine we have now.”
The experimental vaccine is made by Sanofi-Pasteur. During tests it protected only 45 percent of the 91 people who participated in a rushed clinical trial. Reaching even that level of protection required 12 times the dose of antigen delivered by a typical flu shot, and it had to be given in two shots several weeks apart.
Dr. Jack Stapleton of the University of Iowa Hospital Clinic called the vaccine “better than nothing,” referring to its limited effectiveness. Dr. Robert Couch, an advisory panel member from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said members knew of better vaccines still in development, “but this is the only vaccine we had in front of us.”
Another member of the panel, Robert Webster of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, commented that the Sanofi vaccine is an early, clumsy attempt, “very tentative and very necessary to do,” towards better results. “There is a long way to go,” he added.
The panel voted unanimously that the vaccine was effective enough to be used. The American government plans to buy enough bird flu vaccine for 20 million people, including emergency and health care workers. The Sanofi vaccine will not be sold commercially.
A spokesman for Sanofi, a unit of Sanofi-Aventis, described the move as “a positive first step,” adding that the company is currently developing newer ones, including one based on a later strain from Indonesia
The World Health Organization said recently that 16 companies from 10 countries were developing prototype vaccines, and more than 40 clinical trials had been finished or were under way.
