Not only are vaccines often laced with toxic ingredients and potentially dangerous, but they are produced using an antiquated system.
After a bird flu virus emerged in Asia, U.S. officials launched an intense effort to build new defenses against a pandemic, including replacing an antiquated vaccine system, which depends on millions of chicken eggs.
But six years later, as Americans from Washington to California line up to get inoculated against the swine flu, the slow progress toward developing better ways to make a vaccine has become glaringly obvious.
The most immediate solution to the vaccine shortage would be adjuvants -- compounds that boost the immune response, allowing limited stock to be stretched into more doses. H1N1 vaccine with adjuvants is available in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Canada and Mexico. The United States has decided against using adjuvants because the Food and Drug Administration has not fully reviewed them.
Officials worried that a new product would make people even more nervous about the inoculation, and rightly so, considering the adjuvant likely being referred to -- squalene -- has been linked to numerous health problems.