New vaccine's poor results a defeat in war on bird flu
By Jia-Rui Chong and Denise Gellene Los Angeles Times
Setting back plans to protect the United States from a potential bird flu pandemic, the first study of a human vaccine showed that even a massive dose failed to protect nearly half of those inoculated, according to a study released Wednesday.
The vaccine for the avian flu strain known as H5N1 was far less effective than the standard seasonal flu vaccine, which protects 70 percent to 90 percent of the people who get the shot, according to the study in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The experimental bird flu vaccine also required four times the dose of the seasonal inoculation. That effectively cut down the nation's stockpile of the vaccine to about 4 million courses -- only enough to inoculate some health care and vaccine workers.
The current pandemic flu plan, issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in November, calls for enough vaccine for 20 million people, though it does not set a timetable for acquiring the shots.
``It's disappointing in that it takes so much,'' said Robert Webster, a virologist at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, who has been studying this strain of bird flu since it emerged in 1997. ``We have to . . . find ways to do better, to get more bang for the buck.''
Dr. Anthony Fauci, who heads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, acknowledged that the current vaccine ``cannot be the answer to where we want to be.''
He said, however, that the study did demonstrate |