Vaccines And Flu

Vaccines are key to a flu pandemic response, but we can’t make the vaccines in advance. We need to know which flu strain is causing the outbreak before vaccines can be manufactured to protect against it.
People typically need two doses of a vaccine to provide immunity against pandemic flu. At least a third of the population need both doses to establish “herd immunity” and slow the transmission of the virus. This means that during the next pandemic we will need at least 4.7 billion vaccine doses.
The most recent estimates put the potential global supply at around six billion doses and will take a year to make, but this is based on a best-case scenario and is unrealistic.
Eggs are needed to make the flu vaccine and the six billion figure is based on an assumption that egg supply remains intact. This is unlikely during a bird flu outbreak (the 2009 outbreak and the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak were both bird flu strains). The figure is also based on the manufacturing switch-over from seasonal to pandemic flu vaccines going smoothly – a notoriously tricky switch that could cause a loss of production. It is also based on all factories with the ability to make flu vaccines making them, without interruption, for an entire year. In reality, the number of pandemic flu vaccines we can make in a year may be closer to half the most recent estimate. This means a global supply shortfall of nearly two billion doses a year.
Despite vaccines being crucial to combating a flu outbreak, poorer countries have long complained that they are unable to access flu vaccines during a pandemic. My research has shown that almost the entire supply is purchased by the wealthiest countries, leaving the world’s poorest to rely on donations of vaccines from the World Health Organisation (WHO).
In an attempt to remedy this problem, the WHO passed the pandemic influenza preparedness (PIP) framework in 2011. This created a “virtual stockpile”, a stockpile of vaccines promised to the WHO, but which does not yet exist, of at least 150m doses that developing countries can access during a pandemic. Today, the virtual stockpile has about 230m doses committed to it. This sounds positive, but my research shows that the number is far too low to meet the needs of poorer countries.