By Maggie Fox, Reuters. Excerpts: WASHINGTON – First, people were clamoring for H1N1 vaccines, but there were not enough to go around. By the time vaccines were available in any quantity, most of the public had lost interest. And no one knew just how unpredictable the production of vaccines would turn out to be, top U.S. public health leaders agreed on Friday. Getting the U.S. public to roll up their sleeves and get vaccinated was definitely one of the biggest challenges to managing the pandemic of H1N1 swine flu, speaker after speaker agreed at a conference on influenza regrets . “The truth is for this pandemic we had about the longest warning we might ever have for a potential biothreat,” said Dr. Nicole Lurie, who heads preparedness at the Health and Human Services Department. “And yet we all lament how long it took for vaccine to be made,” she told the conference, sponsored by the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School. (This is an excellent argument for why the US Government should not be putting its pandemic response money into vaccines: they are too uncertain and take too long to be manufactured and tested. As I testified to the Committee on Government Reform in 2001 , a smarter way to respond is to identify the virulence factors from known pathogenic microorganisms and develop drugs and monoclonals in response to them–producing a generic supply of remedies ahead of time–Nass) … First, vaccine makers had trouble growing the virus. Then there were problems getting vaccines into vials and shipped. And, experts told the meeting, other problems popped up. UNUSED VACCINES The CDC says that by February 13, as the pandemic waned in the United States (the truth is, according to CDC, the pandemic peaked in late October and waned thereafter; on February 13 the rate of positive flu specimens was less than 2% the rate at the October peak–Nass) , only 97 million H1N1 vaccine doses had been given to 86 million people in the United States, or 78 percent of doses shipped… (” In mid February, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius estimated that 70 million Americans had received the vaccine so far… the CDC added that the precise number of doses that have been administered is not known.” Yet CDC has a weekly tally of exactly how many doses were given , but they won’t admit it–Nass) Further complicating things — the United States uses five suppliers, each of whom made vaccine in a slightly different way. MedImmune’s nasal spray was great for children but inappropriate for high-risk adults and some of the shots were not indicated for young children.

Original Source of Biggest swine flu regret for U.S.: vaccine chaos/ Reuters