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Companies Still Wary of Funding Vaccines
The Bush administration’s Project Bioshield has not erased drug industry concerns on the pitfalls of funding expensive preparation of vaccines against a possible bioterror attack, the Associated Press reported yesterday (see GSN, June 9). Bioshield is designed to guarantee a government market for vaccines that drug makers otherwise would see as unprofitable and be reluctant to produce. President George W. Bush is awaiting the $5.6 billion funding bill to pay for vaccines. However, it remains to be seen if the effort would “have the positive impact we’d like to see,” said Ernest Takafuji, assistant director for biodefense research at the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases. “Companies continue to struggle with this,” he said during a conference yesterday in Baltimore on vaccine development. Companies’ concerns include issues of liability, manufacturing and allocation of funding, AP said. For example, industry representatives wonder whether the U.S. government would always buy a successful vaccine as contracts are going to more than one company, said VaxGen president Lance Gordon. There is also a question of how much standby capability a company would need to make additional treatments if the vaccine stockpile proved inadequate. Gordon still argued for having the private sector lead vaccine development, saying that governments’ efforts had ended unsuccessfully (Alex Dominguez, Associated Press, June 9).
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