Comment by Powell Gammill

Entered on: 4/28/2009 4:24:59 PM

Ten years ago I wrote a brief memo outlining that it would take a minimum of six months to grow up a batch of flu sufficient to inoculate just 80% of the US pop. due to the time it takes to acquire the vast amount of eggs required to cultivate, the time required to grow, harvest and purify the virus, kill the virus, put into vaccine, pass all the regulatory hurdles along the way and have some safety trials in a third world nation.

Nobody liked my memo. But they had plenty of objections to my proposed peptide synthesizers to produce a peptide vaccine on demand as an alternative, combined with emergency abandonment on most regulations. Even then, I estimated the best that could be done was six weeks, which is four weeks too long. A DNA vaccine could be faster, but to hit a two week target would require little in the way of QC, safety and efficacy testing until after the fact.