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Originally posted by Tyrone_Slothrop
No. The demand varies from year to year. That can be predicted. Last year, the companies made something like 96 million doses, and were left with 13 million doses. This year, they only made 83 million, but the flu strain is worse. Children have been dying in Colorado, and it's early.
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The problem with the 'flu vaccine is that it's generally guesswork, since the vaccine needs to go into production six months ahead of 'flu season, no one knows how bad the 'flu is going to be from year to year or which strains are going to be prevalent the next year.
Certainly public health officials and pharma companies can use data to guess, based on a variety of factors how much drug to make and how to construct it. But because of the lead time necessary to produce the drug, development is entirely based on extrapolation from the year before and observation of environmental factors. Many years the vaccine is realtively useless because the strain that does dominate wasn't included in the vaccine. Increased R&D, etc would be useful to develop methods of producing the vaccines more quickly, so some of the guesswork could be removed from the process and so back up vaccines could be developed in a particularly bad season.
The people who really need the vaccine are the elderly, the very young and health care workers. We do not need to vaccinate the entire country, so producing 200 plus million doses to cover everyone would never be necessary. The public health system comes into play in getting the vaccine to these populations, who often are dependent on others for transportation and communication with the health care system. There is a government subsidy for the program. Medicare pays a good portion for the 'flu vaccine. Most health care institutions will subsidize the costs of the vaccine for their own workers. Medicaid will help pay for the kids vaccines.
On a somewhat related note, I'm pissed off as hell at both Tom Scully and Tommy Thompson. Scully announced about a week ago that he's leaving his position as head of CMS (Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, formerly HCFA, Health Care Financing Administration) as of December 15 to join a law firm or investment bank. Thomspon, head of DHHS says today that if Bush wins in '04, he won't be back with the new administration. It irritates me no end that these are the two positions who will be in charge of implementing and writing regulations for the drug benefit bill and these two people were actively lobbying for the bill and neither one of them will commit to seeing the implementation through.
