An article in the Chicago Tribune says we have more to fear from the H1N1 virus than we do the flu shot that could prevent it. Researchers, scientists, federal health authorities and others familiar with how swine flu vaccine is being made, say that this isn’t some new thing being made up in a panic. The vaccine has not been rushed into production, is not full of harmful substances and it is certainly not untested.
Experts argue that the swine flu vaccine is actually the result of a 60-year-old tried-and-true process of making flu vaccine that was tested on thousands of people, including some volunteer researchers, before being scheduled for distribution.
The first testing of both the arm-shot and nasal-spray vaccines was performed on 3,000 volunteers in eight laboratories at Baylor University, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, Emory University, Seattle Group Heath Cooperative, St. Louis University, University of Iowa, University of Maryland and Vanderbilt University.
It’s also being tested by the five firms licensed to make up to 250 million doses of the vaccine by next spring for the U.S. market. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt, was one of the volunteers and says that the vaccine is tested for safety and to see if it produces the level of anti-body production in the blood that reaches FDA standards.
Kenneth Alexander, an infectious disease expert at the University of Chicago, says there is no reason to believe this flu vaccine will be any less safe than the seasonal flu shots because the only difference between the two is the virus it’s made from.
The FDA’s acting deputy commissioner for public health, Jesse Goodman, says that there’s a lot of misinformation being spread around and added that it’s important to have all the facts before making up your mind about whether or not to get the vaccine.
The Tribune article goes on to detail how the vaccine is made:
Last April, when the H1N1 virus was first identified by federal health officials in Mexico and California, they sent it to the pharmaceutical companies they contract so that each of them could formulate their version of the vaccine for field testing before mass production. That process took a month.
The only FDA-approved method for making flu vaccines dates back to the 1940′s. This involves injecting the virus into chicken eggs to be grown into larger quantities. Like many everyday foods and medicines, the ingredients contain a number of vital chemical substances that could be toxic in large doses but are included in the vaccine in harmless, trace amounts.
For instance, the active ingredient in aspirin is acetylsalicylic acid which, taken in proper doses, is effective in reducing fever and relieving headaches. However, if aspirin where to be swallowed in large doses, there would be serious consequences.
A preservative added in trace amounts, thirmerosal, which contains ethyl mercury, is the ingredient that anti-vaccine activists question the most. Critics allege that it can cause autism and other neurological disorders but researches insist that it is present in such a small amount that it poses no harm. Still, single-shot doses can be ordered without thimerosal and there is none of this ingredient in the nasal spray. The U.S. does not add “adjuvants,” another compound raising concerns and sometimes added to vaccines to stimulate the immune response in recipients.
