Flu Fever

President Bush yesterday called for spending $1.2 billion for 20 million doses of an avian flu vaccine that may not work and may never be used. Details of the program are sketchy, so it is hard to know how that money will be spent. Does it include money for research for alternative vaccine manufacturing techniques? According to news accounts this morning, research is included elsewhere in his $7 billion program. My calls to the National Institutes of Health seeking details were not returned. So as now reported, the government announced a plan to pay $60 a dose.

Previous flu vaccines cost $10 a dose or less. There was one experience with higher prices. Last fall, when Chiron's plant in Great Britain was shut down by regulators because of lax manufacturing practices and many nursing homes couldn't get shots for their vulnerable clientele, distributors of existing stockpiles began charging as high as $80 a dose for the routine innoculation.

Is the administration planning to pay gouger rates for its stockpile? Is this the latest Halliburton-style contract about to be awarded by the Bush administration?

The president's announcement came one day after Novartis bid $45 a share or $5.1 billion to acquire the 58 percent stake in Chiron it doesn't already own. This represents a 23 percent premium to Chiron's price last fall after its plant was temporarily shuttered.

Last month, the National Institutes of Health awarded Chiron a $62 million contract to produce an flu vaccine that NIAID director Tony Fauci confidently predicted would be effective against the H5N1 strain of avian flu. I called NIAID yesterday to find out how many doses that represented, but my query disappeared into the maw of the agency's public relations department and wasn't answered.

While this strain of bird flu has killed about half the 120 people who have been infected worldwide, the strain has not yet shown it can be spread by human-to-human contact -- the necessarily precondition for a human pandemic. If it mutates into the global threat feared by public health officials, there is a strong likelihood the avian flu vaccine about to be purchased won't be effective against that mutation.