Quote:
Originally Posted by Bagor
Don't get me wrong, I agree. Was just mentioning it as a cost.
You seem like a man in the know. I asked this before and have still no answer, and it's bugging the hell out of me.
Given that adjuvants in vaccines = increased immunity and it's speculated that they will provide increased protection for any potential mutations.
Why has it taken a pandemic for Health Canada to finally approve adjuvants in flu vaccines? When one would think given the seasonal variation of normal flu years they would have had a greater preventative effect in years past? Why didn't they approve it in the past?
The data hasn't changed significantly in the last 2-3 years.
Is it basically so more of the vaccine can be rolled out? Emergency times call for emergency measures?
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Couple comments regarding this. Adjuvants allow the use of approximately 1/4th of the regular viral load in a vaccine to get the equivalent immune response. Therefore, less of the virus needs to be replicated in order to produce the same amount of vaccines. This was necessary this time around as the production time of this vaccine needed to be shortened (seasonal flu vaccine production usually begins almost one year in advance) and the virus was more difficult than average to replicate in a lab setting. Therefore, a smaller amount of virus was available with greater demand for the vaccine. I assume that the reason this went through approval only this year has to do with the fact that we have never had a situation before where an adjuvant was required and hence all seasonal flu vaccines (in North America) were developed without it. Also, it should be noted that an adjuvant does not provide improved immunity against a potential mutant strain. However, luckily this particular H1N1 subtype does not seem to be mutating currently, so the vaccine will likely be very well matched. Hopefully my rambling makes some sense.