Should the government take over vaccine production?

[december]

*Originally posted by Kimstu *
But if these parasitic diseases are concentrated in developing countries, why would two or three billion people elsewhere be interested in vaccinating against them

Kimstu, you have gone away from the OP, which was concerned with a tetanus vaccine, which would be valuable the world over.

Note also the distinction between viral diseases carried by parasites vs. other diseases associated with parasites. IANAD but I think only the former would be candidates for a vaccine. Please correct me if I’m incorrect.

BTW who know if anyone is working on a malaria vaccine?

[buddy1]

The reason why pharmaceutical firms want out of the vaccine business is simple-their profits from the sale of vaccines are almost non-existent, due to the immense liability insurance premiums they must pay. Say for example, that a given vaccine causes a fatal allergic reaction in 5 PPM of cases. If the relatives sue, the pharmaceuticle firm’s liability can be unlimited (only by the stupidity of juries). A few years back, MERCK informed the US Govt. that they wanted to stop making vaccines-they only relented when the US found out that the european firms WOULD ONLY make vaccines if any liability actions were conducted in the Swiss or French courts.
Another example of how the US legal industry screws us over-according to (the lawyer’s logic) we are better off having NO vaccines that one that causes a tiny number of human fatalities!

[KeithB]

I am not asking for innovation. I simply want a reliable source of vaccines.

Maybe we should go a step further and create a WVO, a UN arm whose sole aim is to provide stable supplies of vaccines and research treatments/vaccines for other public-health style problems, such as the parasitic diseases alluded to above.

It could be funded by a tax on every prescription sold world-wide, like the fees placed on phone bills to wire up por schools to the internet.

The things that scares me most about this is that if people are afraid that the US govt could not handle a job like this, the UN is about 1000X worse.

Of course, one would think that the Homeopathy folks should be able to come up with a super cheap method of curing everyone of these diseases, but I do not think that will happen.

[Kimstu]

december: *Kimstu, you have gone away from the OP, which was concerned with a tetanus vaccine, which would be valuable the world over. *

I know I have. If you didn’t want to deal with a hijack, you needn’t have taken me up on my comments about diseases concentrated in poor countries. As for tetanus vaccines, your use of “would be” puzzles me a bit, but I assume that you know that a tetanus vaccine does already exist (you must have got your kid(s) inoculated with it), and that the cause of the shortage mentioned in the OP, according to the linked article, is *"a byproduct of massive consolidation in the drug industry, often leaving one or two companies making a single drug or vaccine, said Dr. Robert S. Daum, who heads the University of Chicago Children’s Hospital pediatric infectious disease section.

The shortage of tetanus/diphtheria or DT vaccine began after one of two major drug companies producing the vaccine, Wyeth-Ayerst, stopped making it this year. That left the remaining manufacturer, Aventis Pasteur, scrambling to make up the difference."*

So apparently the fact that a tetanus vaccine is valuable the world over is not sufficient to guarantee that pharma firms will actually make enough of it.

*Note also the distinction between viral diseases carried by parasites vs. other diseases associated with parasites. IANAD but I think only the former would be candidates for a vaccine. Please correct me if I’m incorrect. *

IANAD either, and I don’t quite know what you’re referring to by “parasites”; sometimes a virus is called a “parasite”, and sometimes “bacteria”, “viruses”, and “parasites” are distinguished as three different kinds of disease-causing agents. But if you mean “among diseases carried by parasitic insects such as mosquitoes, are viral ones the only candidates for a vaccine?”, the answer is no: for example, Lyme disease is a parasitic-insect-borne bacterial infection for which vaccines are being developed.

BTW who know if anyone is working on a malaria vaccine?

A Google search on “malaria vaccine” turned up the Malaria Vaccine Initiative and their partnership with NIAID, for starters. Apparently NIAID awarded a major research contract for a malaria vaccine in October 2000:

In its continuing efforts to promote research on vaccines to prevent malaria, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) recently awarded a seven-year, $43.8 million contract to Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), McLean, Va., for malaria vaccine production and support services. The contract will support the transition of new malaria vaccine candidates from discovery in the laboratory up to clinical trials. […]

Although a vaccine is needed, private companies are often hesitant to invest significant resources on vaccines that offer little promise of financial return. “The transition from basic to clinical research on malaria vaccines, including production of pilot lots of clinical quality vaccines, has been a particular bottleneck for the field of malaria vaccine development,” explains Stephanie James, Ph.D., head of the parasitology and international programs branch of NIAID’s Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases. “This contract supports President Clinton’s Millennium Vaccine Initiative as it will accelerate development of new vaccines for one of the deadliest and most common infectious diseases of developing countries.”