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Congress has the power to protect vaccines, a product that is vital to the health of the United States and the rest of the world.
ABSTRACT: During the past fifty years, the number of pharmaceutical companies making vaccines has decreased dramatically, and those that still make vaccines have reduced resources to make new ones. Pharmaceutical companies are gradually abandoning vaccines because the research, development, testing, and manufacture of vaccines are expensive and because the market to sell vaccines is much smaller than the market for other drug products. Congressional action could assure both a steady supply of existing vaccines and the promise of vaccines for the future.
PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANIES ARE BUSINESSES, not public health agencies; they are not obligated to make vaccines. Events during the past fifty years have made the manufacture of vaccines more expensive and their sale less profitable. What follows here are case studies of two important vaccines, one for polio and the other for influenza, and the factors that either encouraged or discouraged their production.
* Polio vaccine, 1955. In mid-1953, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (the March of Dimes) was ready to test Jonas Salk's polio vaccine. Made by treating live polio virus with formaldehyde, the Salk vaccine was initially tested in 161 children in and around Pittsburgh.1 When it was time to determine whether Salk's vaccine worked in a field trial involving hundreds of thousands of children, Basil O'Connor, the foundation's director, turned to the two largest vaccine makers in the United States: Eli Lilly of Indianapolis and Parke Davis of Detroit.2 O'Connor realized that only pharmaceutical companies had the expertise, faculties, experience, and skill required to make that much vaccine. After the field trial proved successful-and the polio vaccine was ready to be sold to the public-three more pharmaceutical companies entered the field: Pitman-Moore of Zionville, Indiana; Wyeth Laboratories of Marietta, Pennsylvania; and Cutter Laboratories of Berkeley, California.3 Between 1955 and 1962, physicians and public health agencies administered 400 million doses of polio vaccine across the United States, and the incidence of polio decreased by 90 percent.4
* Influenza vaccine, 2003-2005. The commitment by five pharmaceutical companies to make polio vaccines in 1955 stands in sharp contrast to companies' lack of commitment to making influenza vaccines...