The US federal government is gearing up to cope with the exigency owing to the outbreak of swine flu and has asked, as a result, three drug companies to make an adequate amount of swine flu vaccine to inoculate no less than 20 million people in crucial positions in health care, national security and emergency services. The instruction came to the fore on account of the arduous effort of health officials under the auspices of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and is a part of a government’s $1 billion investment in immediate production and testing of vaccine against the newly emerged strain of the H1N1 flu virus. It is likely that more orders for potentially hundreds of millions of doses of vaccine will be coming soon.

Speaking on this at a news conference at the agency’s day-care center Sebelius stated, “This is really to reserve our place in line.” Nevertheless the annunciation has brought to the fore a number of questions which are unanswered yet. They include the effectiveness of a swine flu vaccine, how many doses it will take to protect a person and who should get it. But Sebelius seemed forthright through stating “we can’t wait” for the answers before putting the manufacturing machinery in motion.

Whatever it is, the government should be credited as the said order is for the making of bulk quantities of a killed version of the virus and two different adjuvants, chemical additives that improve the immune system’s response and enable a lower dose of vaccine to be used, which in turn stretches the supply. The money, in addition, will pay for testing pilot lots of the vaccine in human volunteers.

Health and Human Services has contracts with five companies to make pandemic vaccine. The department has activated the ones with Sanofi Pasteur, Novartis and GlaxoSmithKline. It is still negotiating with the two others, MedImmune and CSL, an Australian company.