Rhiza Labs FluTracker Forum

Taken from here:



http://www.torontosun.com/news/canada/2 ... 39436.html

Within 24 hours? Seriously??

Title of Article: Pandemic exposed communications gap

My opinion: Why you wear boots on a ranch.
Shipping time? Are they overnight FedExing every dose?
There are industries in which such shipping times are important...short half life radio pharmaceuticals come to mind. Vaccines ain't one of them.
A vaccine with a shelf life of 24 hours is useless...that is why they don't make such an animal.

This seems a bit strange. We were told that pH1N1 vaccine is manufactured "the same way" as the seasonal flu vaccine. Did we not have the same problem with the seasonal flu vaccine, then?

Who is the idiot that come up with the idea to package the pH1N1 vaccine in quantities of hundreds of doses? I bet it is a government bureaucrat who wanted to speed up the delivery. Unfortunately, the end result is that we had severe shortage in October/November and now we have oversupply in many countries.

What a disaster, but not exactly unforeseen -- because it is a necessary failure of central planning.
viewtopic.php?f=18&t=2221&p=11981&hilit=mises#p11981

That´s correct,if it´s the same type of GSK vaccine we use.

http://www.immunisation.ie/en/Downloads ... 219_en.pdf

(I.e. 24 hour shelf life AFTER mixing the antigen with the adjuvant).

j6pack,

There must be some other article that you meant to reference because the article whose link you provided is written by someone who keeps talking about how Novartis had a monopoly on US vaccine production. That's simply not true as there were 5 firms, Novartis, Sanofi-Aventis, CSL Limited, Glaxo Smith Kline, and MedImmune who received contracts to provide vaccine.

The reason 5 firms were selected was because it was thought that if any one or two or whatever might encounter production problems, the others would still be able to achieve peak production levels. Instead, unknown to everyone but the most skilled psychics, ALL of the firms had problems getting the H1N1 virus to grow in eggs.

Nobody's fault. That's a function of the virus strain against which the firms had to protect AND the fact that H1N1 was identified very late in the year and well past the time when there might normally be an influenza target selected.

But, all in all, notwithstanding those problems, I think we have been and are in pretty good shape in the US.

Well, here is the most vulnerable vaccine I know of...



http://www.delawareonline.com/article/2 ... -shortened

Ah, Ron, thanks. This is a mass dosage container, requiring breaking the sealed container, mixing adjuvants, and compromising sterility. At that point it is like meat in the fridge...24 hours is probably pretty good advice.
Give me a sterile one shot vial, please. Too much can happen in the mixing process.
Excellent post, Ron.

Well....if that is, indeed, the same vaccine in Canada that is being used in Sweden, it seems to me that you simply don't mix what you won't use within 24 hours. How is that a problem?

I guess I should read the Toronto Sun article.

Once you break the seal on the big jar, it is no longer medically sterile. The whole get a big jar and mix is a bad idea.

So they packaged vaccine in massive 100 dose vials? No wonder they didn't feel small family doctors were appropriate recipients. So I agree that that shouldn't have been done so that family doctors as well as mass public health clinics could have administered vaccine (as was properly done in the US).