Swine flu vaccine still in short supply around campus and county

Like many communities nationwide, Ohio University and Athens County are still short on the H1N1 vaccine.

So far, OU has received 500 doses of vaccine though it ordered 33,000 doses. As of Friday, the school had not received any more.

"As we speak, right now we have none in hand," David Hopka, assistant vice president of safety and risk management at OU, said Friday.

Hopka said he "had no idea" when or how many doses of the vaccine the university would receive from the Ohio Department of Health.

Dr. James Gaskell, health commissioner for the Athens City-County Health Department, confirmed that the department has received 6,240 doses of vaccine to date and has administered 5,418 doses.

"We're not sitting on this vaccine; we're getting it out," Gaskell said.

The local Health Department received the vaccine in mid-October and held its first clinic on Oct. 15 for at-risk groups - pregnant women, young children, people with high-risk health conditions and health-care workers. Since then, the department has held several more clinics.

Gaskell said the Health Department has had to turn away some people at its clinics because they did not belong to high-risk groups. But overall, he said the county has been successful in vaccinating as many people as possible.

"I feel comfortable that we have impacted the chronic underlying conditions," he said.

The Health Department has several school clinics lined up for this week, where it will distribute the remainder of its doses.

OU ran a clinic on Nov. 1 and vaccinated 529 people, including 198 students, 59 faculty members, 96 staff members and 176 dependants. Hopka said it was possible to vaccinate more than 500 people because some vaccine was in multi-dose vials. Also, small children do not need as much of the vaccine as adults.

At the university clinic, Hopka said no one was turned down in a high-risk group. The university had scheduled at least three other clinics for administering the vaccine but those have since been canceled because of the vaccine shortage.

Hopka said he fully expects the university to receive more vaccine over the winter break.

The Ohio Department of Health narrowed its guidelines for at-risk individuals when the state was notified in mid-October that there was a shortage of vaccine. The university and county are still following federal Centers for Disease Control guidelines to vaccinate a broader range of individuals.

"The prioritization has sort of been a moving target," Hopka said.

LAST WEEK, TWO SUBCOMMITTEES of the House Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing on H1N1 flu preparedness on Capitol Hill.

Rep. Zach Space, D-Ohio, and other committee members criticized the slow production and uncoordinated distribution of the H1N1 flu vaccine and said a federal response to the pandemic may have been more effective than state action.

"I think it's important that we understand what we can do as a legislative body to enhance our ability to manufacture and distribute this vaccine in a better way," Space told the subcommittees.

Space said he is interested in providing more "educational components" to "combat this troubling epidemic."

Dr. Anne Schuchat, the CDC's director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said at the hearing that the CDC has put state health departments in charge of distributing the vaccine to local health agencies.

"At the national level, we may not understand communities' supply and demand," Schuchat acknowledged.

Gaskell said he thinks he thinks it's better to distribute the vaccine on a state basis because the state health departments are closer to the need.

"I think they also need to let local health departments have some freedom to decide how they're going to use the vaccine that they get," Gaskell said.

Hopka said he doesn't think that the delivery and distribution problem can be attributed to the states or the Ohio Department of Health. "I believe the shortage is directly attributable to the (federal) Department of Health and Human Services seriously overstating the quantity and the timeliness of vaccine availability."

Schuchat said the CDC and HHS are doing everything they can to increase vaccine production. "We will have more vaccine to put in the path of this virus," she said.

So far, Ohio has received about 1.6 million doses of vaccine for its 11.5 million residents.

As of Nov. 20, Ohio had 30 confirmed H1N1-related deaths, according to the Ohio Department of Health. In Athens County, there has been one confirmed death.

The CDC reports that, as of last week, an estimated 22 million people nationwide had been diagnosed with H1N1 since its outbreak in April. Nearly 4,000 people have died and another 98,000 have been hospitalized.

Editor's note: Athens NEWS campus reporter Emily Mullin reports from the Scripps Howard Foundation Wire in Washington, D.C.