Category: A.M. Vitals: Avandia Panel Member a Paid Speaker for GSK

Laura Landro
Also: hospitals using Tasers; cautious optimism over a possible HIV preventive; end of the line for swine flu pandemic?
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MEwens
Also: legal battles over health-care overhaul begin; AstraZeneca gets fined by an E.U. court; excess swine flu vaccine stocks headed for the trash.
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Katherine Hobson
WHO and its defenders respond to criticism of the organization’s handling of the H1N1 pandemic.
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MEwens
A study out today reports what happened to 18 pregnant women with H1N1 who ended up in two New York hospitals – and it shows things can get pretty bad.
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Katherine Hobson
In a flu pandemic, public health officials have to convince people that the illness is a serious health threat, and that the vaccine is safe.
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JGrimes
Hundreds of thousands of Americans usually stay home at some point during the winter battling fever, aches and pains — all the result of a normal flu season. But this flu season is clearly marching to a different drummer.
The H1N1 swine flu came and mostly went and seasonal flu has barely come […]

James A. White
The method of making flu vaccines from chicken eggs is slow and expensive, but it has proved reliable for 60 years. So that’s what drug makers used last year in ramping up a new vaccine to offer protection from the sudden spread of the H1N1 virus.
But “the response to H1N1 was […]

noreply@blogger.com (RCoffield@fsblaw.com)
A story in this morning’s WSJ cracks open what one government official calls a “secure system to protect these birds”: Secretive farms, classified as part of the nation’s “critical infrastructure,” where hens lay the hundreds of thousands of eggs needed to make swine-flu vaccine.
The article put us in mind of another big […]

noreply@blogger.com (RCoffield@fsblaw.com)
More action today on how governments are dealing with falling demand for the H1N1 (swine) flu vaccine.
The U.S. cut its order from the Australian manufacturer CSL by more than half, to 14 million doses, Bloomberg reports. The U.S. is allowed to change the quantity of its order under its contract with CSL, […]

JGrimes
Here’s a quick tour of drug and vaccine news from around the globe:
Sanofi-Aventis is recalling 800,000 doses of swine flu vaccine sold in the U.S. for use in infants and toddlers. The vaccine is safe, but it appears to have to have fallen “slightly below” the specified potency, the CDC said. The recalled […]