Swine flu Vaccine

• Half of pregnant women ‘will refuse swine flu vaccine’ (telegraph.co.uk)
• Swine flu vaccine to be given to entire population (telegraph.co.uk)
• ‘No Flu Shots for My Kids’ (health.usnews.com)
• Kids First to Get Swine Flu Vaccine (abcnews.go.com)

Influenza vaccines are typically developed to cope with seasonal flu to minimize infection rates, yet influenza still kills about 500,000 people a year around the world. In June 2009, a strain of influenza derived from swine influenza was declared a pandemic (see 2009 flu pandemic). This new strain, Pandemic H1N1/09 virus, was antigenically different from the existing seasonal strains, requiring the production of a vaccine distinct from the 2009-2010 seasonal flu vaccine.

Developing, testing, and manufacturing sufficient quantities of a vaccine for H1N1/09 is a process which takes many months. Keiji Fukuda of the WHO said, “There’s much greater vaccine capacity than there was a few years ago, but there is not enough vaccine capacity to instantly make vaccines for the entire world’s population for influenza.”?Nasal mist version of the vaccine started shipping in October 01, 2009. ?Health care workers in the US states of Tennessee and Indiana are the first recipients of the H1N1 vaccine, while two-thirds of Americans plan to be vaccinated against the flu . On October 6 2009 California received its first shipment of the H1N1 vaccine.

Testing
Initial Phase I human testing began with Novartis’ MF59 candidate in July 2009, at which time phase II trials of CSL’s candidate CSL425 vaccine were planned to start in August 2009, but had not begun recruiting. ?Sanofi Pasteur’s candidate inactivated H1N1 had several phase II trials planned as of 21 July 2009 (2009 -07-21)[update], but had not begun recruiting. News coverage conflicted with this information, as Australian trials of the CSL candidate were announced as having started on 21 July, and the Chinese government announce the start of trials of the Hualan Biological Engineering candidate.

Pandemrix, made by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), was approved by the European Medicines Agency on 25 September 2009, and Baxter’s vaccine has been reported as likely to get approved the following week. The first comparative clinical study of both vaccines started on children in the UK on 25 September.

Protection and side-effects

The degree of protection conferred by the various vaccines under development and testing is not yet known.

Expected side-effects include sore arms and fevers. Rare side-effects may include the Guillain-Barr