Regardless, expect to get the regular flu shot. Manufacturers already have a lot of it brewed in advance of fall inoculation campaigns.
"If a vaccine for this new virus is prepared, it would be prepared either in parallel with or after the seasonal vaccine is already produced," Nancy Cox, flu chief at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Friday. "We would be able to have the seasonal vaccine and then if necessary as a supplemental" vaccine against the new swine flu virus.
The World Health Organization has put vaccine makers on notice as authorities grapple with this puzzling new strain of flu. It hit Mexico hard but seems to be causing milder disease in the U.S. and elsewhere. Standard anti-flu drugs can treat it, and the CDC said it doesn't seem to be spreading any faster than regular winter flu. But because people have never been exposed to this novel strain
- a mix of pig, human and bird viruses - a race is on to develop a vaccine.
Influenza vaccine production is a long, complicated process and vaccine makers already were in the midst of making about 130 million doses of next winter's, plenty for usual demand.
Much of that production is done, with large amounts of vaccine already stored in holding tanks to be bottled later, said Dr. William Schaffner of Vanderbilt University Medical Center, a vaccine adviser to the federal government.
"We already have it well under way," agreed Donna Cary, spokeswoman for Sanofi-Aventis, the world's largest flu vaccine maker. The final total "really depends on when that switch occurs."
The U.S. clearly expects experimental doses of a swine flu vaccine: CDC scientists and some collaborating laboratories hope to deliver to manufacturers in early May a virus strain properly engineered to be a vaccine candidate. It would take manufacturers another eight to 10 weeks to brew pilot lots for testing in small numbers of people this summer.
