The Swine Flu Affair Part II?

Blowing the Shot: What we can learn from the shortage of H1N1 vaccine

As I was reading this article today, I couldn't help but think...this sure sounds like the Swine Flu Affair in its approach to pointing out the shortcomings in the response to H1N1, except that this one is more or less in real time. In the same way that the Swine Flu Affair attempted to bring to light the missteps in the swine flu scare of 1976 in order to learn lessons from the past, this article is quick to point out what lessons there are to learn in our current shortage of H1N1 vaccines.

Here are some of the main criticisms:
* We are using slow and outdated technology to grow these vaccines in hen eggs rather than developing quicker methods culturing the virus in mammalian cells.
* "The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Health and Human Services decided to finish making the seasonal flu vaccine before transitioning to the new vaccine, even as evidence suggested that the new pandemic was going to crowd out the yearly flu."
* "Baxter Pharmaceuticals' H1N1 vaccine Celvapan utilizes the much speedier process of culturing mammalian (monkey) cells rather than hen eggs." This vaccine was tested and determined to be safe, but the FDA was apparently unwilling to take the risk of using a new vaccine technique.

On the policy level, I have not been following H1N1 closely enough to know how valid some of these criticisms are. However, one issue that I found particularly interesting was this repeat issue of seasonal flu vaccine versus swine flu vaccine...which one to focus on. In the swine flu scare of 1976, one of the early issues that the CDC had to decide on was whether to continue to manufacture the Victoria flu vaccine or concentrate all efforts on the swine flu vaccine. They pretty much chose to focus on the swine flu vaccine (making small amounts of the bivalent type). And that was determined later to be the wrong choice. This time around, the focus was put on the seasonal flu. And once again, it is being criticized as the wrong choice because the H1N1 hasn't been following the pattern of the normal "flu season." Well then...it appears that learning from the past may be more difficult than it seems.