The Gaithersburg-based biotech firm MedImmune Inc. will resume production of its nasal-spray influenza vaccine and deliver an additional million doses by early January, the company and federal officials announced yesterday.
The company had previously announced it would make 1 million more doses from components left over from this season's original production run of 1.1 million. With the additional amount announced yesterday, MedImmune's total offering this season will be about 3 million doses.
The nation's total flu vaccine supply will reach about 61 million doses this season, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson said last night in a telephone news conference.
The government hopes to get about 2 million more doses from Canadian suppliers and is negotiating with three European countries to try to get unused vaccine. Lester M. Crawford, acting head of the Food and Drug Administration, said one of the countries was France but would not name the others.
The U.S. supply of flu vaccine this winter had been expected to be about 100 million doses. Early this month, however, one of two suppliers of the traditional injectable vaccine, Chiron Corp., announced that the 48 million doses slated for U.S. distributors had been impounded by British regulators because of bacterial contamination of some lots made at its plant outside Liverpool.
Thompson stressed that much of the remaining injectable vaccine -- all made by Aventis Pasteur, the only other flu-shot manufacturer -- has not yet been sent to clinics, hospitals and doctors' offices. Officials of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are working with Aventis to redirect its unshipped supplies to high-priority groups and to places that had ordered mostly from Chiron and are now without any vaccine.
"Everybody thinks it's all out there, it's all been shipped. It hasn't," Thompson said. "We're going to have about 24 million doses of vaccine that will be shipped in the next seven weeks. And then there will be an additional 2.6 million doses in the first weeks of January."
Thompson said people who cannot find vaccine now will probably be able to find it over the next two months. "We want them to be persistent but not stand in line," he said.
The 2.6 million doses to which Thompson referred is the amount Aventis said earlier this week it could make from leftover material from its regular production run and a small amount of new vaccine virus it will grow over the next month.
MedImmune's FluMist is a "live" virus vaccine that grows in the nose, stimulating immunity. The FDA has given MedImmune permission to market the vaccine only to healthy people ages 5 to 49. The main target groups for vaccination are children ages 6 months to 23 months, people older than 65 , and those between ages 2 and 65 with chronic illness.
Q. What is the flu? 
