Former U.S. senators Bob Graham and Jim Talent aren't afraid to break a few eggs to make a point: Why, they ask, if we're not flying propeller-powered planes, pounding manual typewriters or watching Elvis gyrate on black-and-white TVs, are we still using eggs to make flu vaccine?
All of the above -- the senators fumbling eggs, the prop planes, the typewriters and Elvis -- appear in a video made to dramatize their concern about why 21st-century drugmakers are using 1950s technology to make a potentially lifesaving vaccine.
It's anything but an idle question for Graham and Talent, who lead the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism. If medicine can't react quickly enough to stop the spread of flu, Graham asks, what will happen when, not if, someone releases a biological weapon? "We think the threat is real. We want to take steps to reduce our vulnerability," says Graham, whose group predicted that someone would release a bioweapon somewhere by 2013.
Despite the gravity of the subject, the video was designed to be "light-hearted and entertaining," says commission director Randall Larsen, who created it with Hollywood veteran Jay Lavender, who wrote the 2006 hit The Break-Up.
"We wanted people to pass it around and talk about it," Larsen says. "We didn't want to make an Army training film."
The short film's focus is on why H1N1 vaccine wasn't available before children returned to school. Today, two months into flu's resurgence, vaccine remains in short supply: About 30 million doses are available for 150 million people at high risk of complications.
One reason shortages exist is that the H1N1 virus doesn't grow as well as hoped in eggs, an approach developed in 1930s for flu research and later adapted to vaccine production. Newer methods that involve growing flu virus in cells are licensed in Europe and China but are still about a year or two away from use in the USA, says William Schaffner, a flu expert at Vanderbilt University. Genetically engineered vaccines also are in the works.
Schaffner says the new approaches may help shorten the time needed to make vaccine, now about six months, but no one knows how much. The new approach could, however, reduce the risk that a lethal bird-flu pandemic will simultaneously wipe out chickens and our ability to make vaccine.
What's most worrisome, says Gigi Gronvall, a flu vaccine expert at the University of Pittsburgh Center for Biosecurity and the commission's scientific adviser, is that "flu vaccine is state-of-the-art. We couldn't get a vaccine out for any other disease as quickly as flu."
Larsen says a breakthrough is needed. "We need the capability to go from bug to drug in 24 hours. That may seem like a preposterous idea, but in 1950, putting a man on the moon would have seemed goofy."
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