More than half the U.S. bird flu budget will go to developing new vaccines, Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt said on Monday, but it will take at least six months to produce a bird flu vaccine once a pandemic breaks out.
He says the virus is changing and there’s no way to plan ahead for which strain might become capable of moving from person to person. He says that means the government will have to stockpile vaccine for each of the main H5N1 strains going around the world.
Another big part of the $3.3 billion allocated by Congress for this year would go to stockpiling drugs that fight influenza, Leavitt told reporters.
“The bulk of our money -- $1.781 billion of the money -- is directed at a vaccine,” Leavitt said.
In the meantime, he said, state and local officials, companies, schools and individuals should be preparing for the economic and social disruption that would come with any pandemic.
The H5N1 avian influenza virus has spread across Europe, taken hold in Africa and flared anew in Asia in recent weeks. While it remains mostly a disease of poultry, it can occasionally infect people and has sickened 176, killing 98 of them, according to the World Health Organization.
That does not include three people reported by Azerbaijan’s Health Ministry on Monday as having died from the virus.
Leavitt and other experts say it is only a matter of time, perhaps just a few months, before the virus spreads to birds in the United States. No one can say if or when the virus would mutate into a form spread easily from person to person, thus setting off a pandemic.
Last year, President Bush asked Congress for $7.1 billion to prepare for a pandemic. Congress approved just half of that and Leavitt on Monday released the details of how it would be spent.
His report said $731 million would be spent on drugs such as Roche’s and Gilead Sciences’ Tamiflu and GlaxoSmithKline’s Relenza. Leavitt said he hoped the federal government would have 26 million courses of the antivirals by the end of the year.
Buying masks and ventilators
“In addition to stockpiling antivirals, $162 million will be used to procure essential medical supplies for a pandemic. Planned purchases this year include 6,000 ventilators, 50 million surgical masks, 50 million N95 respirators (face masks), and face shields, gloves and gowns,” the report reads.
Last week, Leavitt’s office authorized the development of a second vaccine formulation using one of the new strains of H5N1 that has emerged as it spreads from birds to people.
Companies are already developing and testing vaccines based on the strain that infected people in Vietnam in 2004, but at least two substrains have since emerged that are different enough to justify making a new formulation.
“We are within a matter of weeks before we will put ... out contracts to major manufacturers,” Leavitt said.
He said HHS would also be looking for proposals from companies to make vaccines using new technologies that do not rely on eggs, as current influenza vaccines do, and perhaps using boosters known as adjuvants to stretch the vaccine supply.
Leavitt has been traveling across the United States holding pandemic “summits” where he hears concerns and urges local leaders to get busy preparing for a pandemic. He issues checklists and signs a “contract” with each state on what it plans to do.
He has seen much that worries him -- a lack of hospital space, few ideas for when and how to close schools and difficulties surrounding the distribution of drugs and vaccines.
“I am seeing many states exercise their plans and when they exercise their plans, weaknesses are revealed,” Leavitt said. “And when weaknesses are revealed, things get better.”