Vaccine Production

Almost every day, we hear another story about the spread of avian flu and the possibility that it will lead to a pandemic rivaling the disaster of 1918. Responding to this growing fear, the president recently announced a $7.1 billion plan that would include purchase of 20 million doses of vaccine to protect against the current strain of avian flu. The plan also included incentives to develop new production methods, and protection against liability claims so that vaccine makers would add U.S.-based facilities. “If a pandemic strikes, our country must have a surge capacity in place that will allow us to bring a new vaccine online quickly and manufacture enough to immunize every American against the pandemic strain,” said the president. (For more on the White House’s strategy, see my From the Editor commentary on page 12.)

Of course, this news didn’t occur in a vacuum. A year before the current panic, the U.S. faced a shortfall of 48 million doses of flu vaccine after Chiron revealed production problems at its UK facility. Before that, we worried about SARS. Before that, we had West Nile virus. Before that, it was anthrax. It seems we’ve been on the verge of a pandemic or a biological attack for years now.

With all these viral plagues ready to sweep the earth, you’d think that the vaccine market would be poised to rival that of therapeutic drugs. In reality, vaccines comprise a small portion of sales at the major players in the field, except at Chiron, where production problems left it vulnerable to a recent takeover by Novartis. Vaccine products have approximately $4.9 billion in U.S. sales, according to a recent report from the Freedonia Group. Despite our ongoing pandemic panics, conventional vaccines don’t have the cachet or profit margins of small-molecule drugs and biologics.

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