Are drugs giants making a killing from a useless vaccine?

Are drugs giants making a killing from a useless vaccine?

Pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline is set to make a massive profit from the swine flu crisis having already acquired the contracts for 195 million doses of the newly developed vaccine. It will supply countries worldwide with Britain having already placed an order of 60 million doses that will set developed nations back by £6 a shot. This is despite speculation that production costs barely exceed £1.However, with the imminent launch of this flu shot comes the question of whether it is actually of any use and if cases in the capital are anything to go by, we are left questioning whether it will be enough.

A recent article in the London Evening Standard has argued that the capital has already developed its own mutated version of the virus. Experts have put this down to the sheer number of recorded cases across London which has caused the virus to mutate. The Royal College of GPs has also argued that around 12,500 new strains of the infection are being reported every week and whilst Dr Oliver Pybus of Oxford University has likened the prediction of mutations to that of predicting the weather over a period of months-impossible, he has also expressed fears that London would be first to be hit by a more serious strain due to the number of travellers passing through.

These findings have come just weeks after reports emerged from Berlin that the virus was beginning to mutate into a more aggressive form. As the number of deaths increased, so did the number of victims who were otherwise healthy. Other overseas cases should also be considered, such as figures showing that the H1N1 virus has begun to replace all other seasonal flu strains, accounting for 90% of all cases in the southern hemisphere. This has happened as it begins to move closer to the winter season, classic pandemic behaviour. In our opinion this is surely a peek into our own future, and as our summer draws to a close, it is surely a sign that we should be looking to prepare for mutations and progressions rather than relying on a single potentially useless vaccine.

There is also need to consider the fact that if swine flu doesn’t totally replace seasonal flu and milder strains of the virus such as the common H3N2, then we are going to need a number of vaccines, for a variety of age groups. This will without a doubt complicate matters. Jeanette Vega, the under-secretary of public health in Chile has also subscribed to this opinion, commenting at a pandemic summit in Cancun that "the seasonal vaccine is useless."