It is too soon to determine whether tens of thousands of doses of H1N1 swine flu vaccine may have to be thrown out if they are not used by their expiration date, US health officials said last week.
The US ordered enough antigen to make 229 million doses of the vaccine as the swine flu pandemic began to ramp up about a year ago. About 162 million doses have been shipped and between 81 and 91 million doses have been administered, according to the US CDC.
However, an estimated 71.5 million doses of the H1N1 vaccine may have to be discarded if not used before the expiry date, costing the taxpayer millions of dollars.
It was expected that at least half of the population would have been vaccinated by January 2010. But in reality only about one fifth of US adults had been vaccinated and more than one third of the children, according to the CDC.
The CDC also estimates that the H1N1 virus killed about 12,000 people and put 265,000 in the hospital, compared with the seasonal flu which kills an average of 36,000 people and puts 200,000 people in the hospital per year.
Getting the vaccine to the population has been a problem. Initially 200 million vaccines were ordered, and any American could get the vaccine together with the flu shot. But this didn’t happen. The vaccines that were due to be released in October, were shipped out in batches in November and were freely available in early January, once the ‘hype’ had died down and people had lost interest.
So if the vaccines were delivered on time, when demand was greater than supply, and all the logistics and product deficiencies had been ironed out, the taxpayer would have been spared this enormous drain of money.
