Aventis, which succeeded in producing usable flu shots for the American market this year, and Chiron, which didn't, both get U.S. Government contracts for vaccine against the looming avian flu menace

The United States government, the only government yet to do so, on August 17th announced the award of a contract to develop a test vaccine against the H9N2 variant of avian influenza, one of the three major strains of this disease, to Chiron Corporation, of Emeryville, California.

Earlier in the year, on May 27th, the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) announced that it had awarded contracts to both Aventis and Chiron to produce test quantities of vaccine against the H5N1, another, currently more prevalent, type of avian influenza virus.

On September 21, 2004, Aventis, part of the sanofi-aventis Group and the largest influenza vaccine producer in the world, and the U.S Department of Health and Human Services announced that they'd signed a contract whereby Aventis, which produced the half of U.S. flu vaccine that was not excluded from the market because of contamination, would "manufacture and store 2 million doses of avian influenza H5N1 vaccine" based on an attenuated version of that strain.

Chiron's tarnished track record

This is the same Chiron Corporation whose failure to maintain adequate sanitation at its Fluvirin® factory in Liverpool, England, U.K., led to that plant's decertification on October 5, 2004, by the Medicines and Health Products Regulation Agency (MHRA), the British health authority. But, according to the United States' National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), "because the H9N2 vaccine is being produced in Siena, Italy, the current situation [italics added] will have no effect on the production of the H9N2 vaccine."

The judgment of Britain's MHRA was eventually ratified by the FDA on October 15, 2004, when the Acting FDA Commissioner, Dr. Lester Crawford, told a Washington, D.C. press conference that "none of the influenza vaccine manufactured by Chiron is safe for use'' and "we did enough testing to conclude that we cannot guarantee the safety of any of the vaccine."

For the formal announcement about this from the FDA, in which it says, "Today, we are announcing that none of the influenza vaccine manufactured by the Chiron Corporation for the US market is safe for use," click here.

As these new contracts were awarded by the U.S. Government, nothing was said about problems internal to Chiron that allowed the hygiene problems to develop to the point where their Liverpool plant was decertified, generating flu shot shortages, black markets, theft of vaccine, rising prices for the dosages remaining, mini-invasions of Canada by Americans looking for flu shots, and, finally, a growing concern that the arrangements in place for producing adequate quantifies of flu vaccine on a timely basis were in need of an "agonizing re-appraisal."

Congressmember Waxman and the emerging FluGate™ cover-up

California Congressmember Henry Waxman has been trying and failing to get the Food and Drug Administration to come clean on its role in allowing the hygiene problems at the Liverpool plant to develop and in possibly covering up those problems.

While contracts are awarded to develop new vaccines to a company that couldn't successfully produce an established one, a global avian influenza pandemic is waiting in the wings

Prior to this, on October 11, 2004, Etopia Media Medical News Network (EMMNN) in an article called "Could the bird flu virus H5N1 cause a 1918-class global influenza pandemic?" provided some background information about efforts then underway in Great Britain to determine if the deadly influenza strain of the 1918 pandemic, which killed at least 20 million and possibly as many as 50 million people worldwide, was itself a form of avian influenza.

In an article published on October 6, 2004, entitled, Scientists resurrect killer genes from 1918 flu pandemic," an Agence France-Presse story published in the Hindustani Times reports on an experiment which seems to prove the hypothesis that their British counterparts were at the time still clearing legal hurdles to test.

These scientists, working in what the Hindustani Times called " top-security labs," recreated the 1918 flu virus by inserting two crucial genes from that species into human flu virus to which a certain strain of lab mice was known to be immune.

The experimented-upon rodents died from the injection of genetically-engineered flu virus:

"Within three days, mice that had been exposed to the [this] gene were mortally ill. Post-mortems showed the virus had rampaged through their lungs, producing inflammation and haemorrhaging characteristic of the symptoms induced by the 1918 outbreak."

The scientists who did this experiment explained that the original 1918 influenza vector "leapt to humans by mutating from bird flu, possibly after passing through pigs, which are able to harbour both human and avian viruses and thus allow them to swap genes as the viruses reproduce."

This method, apparently used by the 1918 pandemic variant of flu, is the same one that contemporary scientists are worried will once again provide a means of mutating and transmitting a pathogen endemic to fowl into the human sphere, by which time, they fear, it will have acquired the ability to spread from human to human, and once again be capable of causing a level of devastation comparable to, or greater than, that which was experienced at the end of World War I, when vast masses of humanity, in both Europe and the United States, under the stress caused by the multiple disruptions of "The Great War," were particularly susceptible to a disease to which they had, and had had no way of acquiring, any previous immunity.

In the face of massive unpreparedness for such an eventuality, the World Health Organization (WHO), the pubic health unit of the United Nations, is planning a conference to head off the possible pandemic

The United Nations/World Health Organization avian influenza summit, announced today by Klaus Stohr, influenza chief of the United Nations' health agency, is planned for November 11, 2004, in Geneva, Switzerland. This meeting will take place within the context of inadequate supplies of vaccine to protect against avian influenza, inadequate means of producing more quickly, and the unsettling lessons learned (or not learned) from the recent Chiron/Liverpool debacle.

If all else fails

If prevention through mass inoculation proves impossible, according to Dr. Frederick Hayden, a University of Virginia virus expert, the spread of avian influenza may be slowed through the use of anti-virals such as oseltamivir, available only by prescription as Tamiflu®, which may ease the symptoms of avian influenza infections.

According to the Associated Press article on the WHO Geneva Avian Influenza Conference, Tamiflu itself "is in short supply."

Tamiflu is a product of Hoffmann-La Roche Inc. (Roche), based in Nutley, NJ, the U.S. prescription drug unit of the Roche Group.

 

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