Pharmaceutical companies are struggling to make swine flu vaccine, designed to prevent influenza A H1N1 infection, for use in the United States. GlaxoSmithKline still has not received U.S. government approval for its swine flu vaccine and Novartis is experiencing delays in delivering swine flu vaccine, as well.  

People have been lining up outside clinics across the United States to be immunized with the swine flu vaccine, but the suppliers of the H1N1 vaccine have cut estimates of how much will be delivered over the next month. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), companies are having more difficulty than expected in making the swine flu vaccine.

Although the HHS predicated that it would have distributed 85 million doses of the swine flu vaccine by the end of October, only 22.4 million doses have been distributed so far. Interestingly, the director the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggested that interest in the swine flu vaccine might have increased in response to its scarcity.

It is expected that significantly more swine flu vaccine will become available over the next few weeks. And, in the bigger picture, it’s still a remarkable accomplishment that so many doses of the swine flu vaccine have been delivered only six months after the H1N1 virus was discovered.

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Adapted from Reuters Health, 27 October 2009.