Us Lacks Capacity to Make Bird Flu Vaccine

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - It will be three to five years before the United States can produce enough bird flu vaccine to inoculate its population against a potentially deadly outbreak in humans, a top administration official said on Sunday.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Leavitt told NBC's "Meet the Press" that until production capacity is sufficient for the entire population, supplies would have to be rationed in the event of an outbreak.

"We will not have the capacity to produce 300 million doses of a vaccine for three to five years," Leavitt said.

"We have allowed the vaccine manufacturing industry to diminish to a point that they don't have the ability," he added. "We have to do nothing short of rebuild that industry."

Once the capacity is there, another six months will be needed to produce sufficient quantities of the vaccine, he added.

"In the meantime, we will not have enough for everyone. And consequently, very difficult, agonizingly tough decisions will need to be made," he added.

His agency has developed a plan that would give top priority to health-care workers and people who make the vaccine. Older people and other high-risk people would have high priority. Healthy school-aged children are relatively low on the priority list.

Leavitt said the list was put out for public discussion but that it would be up to individual states to develop their own set of priorities for limited supplies of vaccine.

"Make no doubt about it, the decision on how to allocate scarce resources during a time of a pandemic are very difficult and troubling choices," he added.

Millions of birds have been slaughtered, mostly in Asia, to stem the spread of the bird flu virus. The virus cannot yet easily infect people, but it has sickened 130 people in five countries in Asia, killing 67 since late 2003.

Officials are worried the virus will mutate and spread more easily among humans and say governments need to be prepared for the worse case scenario -- a global pandemic.

"If it doesn't happen, that doesn't mean that preparedness went to waste, because sooner or later it (a pandemic) is going to happen, and that's what we want to do," Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on the same program.