County’s Supply of Influenza Vaccine Runs Dry

After two weeks of administering the much-delayed flu vaccine, county health officials say they have run out of the serum and can’t be certain when more will be coming.

All 10,000 doses of the vaccine have been given, officials for the county’s public health offices said. They received the vaccine in late October, several weeks later than deliveries in previous years and about half as many doses as normally requested.

Public health employees had hoped the doses, which they began distributing on Nov. 1, would be enough to hold them until the next delivery, then anticipated for this week.

So far, however, health officials are still waiting.

“Everything is just on hold until we get some more,” said Lin Glusac, immunization coordinator for Ventura County.

Officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the county might get some next week, “but they would not even commit to that,” Glusac said.

In Los Angeles County, health officials warned that clinics there are either out or nearly out of the vaccine, which will force them to cancel clinics for patients most susceptible to the illness.

Orange, San Diego, Imperial and San Francisco counties already have been forced to cancel clinics until additional supplies of vaccine arrive.

Health officials throughout the country have struggled to get adequate shipments of the vaccine, which has been scarce because of a delay in the serum’s production. As deliveries began trickling in to hospitals and clinics last month, the CDC urged health providers to limit shots to only those most at risk for the virus: the elderly, adults and children suffering from chronic illnesses, and pregnant women.

To meet that request, health officials in Ventura County set up clinics at several nursing homes and estimate as many as 6,000 doses of the vaccine were distributed in care facilities.

Large batches of the vaccine are expected to hit public health clinics in the coming weeks, but Glusac said much of those will again be limited to people in the high-risk category.

The late disbursements are not expected to adversely affect those most at risk, health officials said, noting that the state has yet to report any flu cases.

“All across California, we really haven’t seen the flu disease,” Glusac said. “Thank goodness for that.”

Vaccinations will eventually be made available to a wider portion of the population, Glusac said, but that may not be until late December or early January. Even that late into the flu season, which generally starts in November, Glusac said it’s a good idea for residents to get the vaccine.

“Because the flu season can last till March or April,” she said. “We’re just usually so well prepared that people are used to coming in much sooner.”

California’s Department of Health Services, which supplies county health departments with the vaccine, has received just a third of needed supplies from its Virginia distributor.

For now, however, nationwide shortages that initially were caused by production problems among manufacturers, are being made worse by uneven distribution of the vaccine and marked price inflation, critics say.

Because of those problems, officials worry that the elderly, the chronically ill and others more vulnerable to disease may not receive protection before the flu season begins in earnest.

Physicians, pharmacies and hospitals in the private sector--which provide most vaccinations--say they face the choice of waiting for their pre-ordered vaccine or buying it at exorbitant prices on the open market.

Ron Sato, director of pharmacy services at Los Alamitos Medical Center, said his hospital has received none of a batch it ordered from its distributor back in April, so it was forced to order enough on short notice to cover staff members in critical areas. It paid six times the pre-booked price.

“I think it’s really, really a shame that the flu shot vaccine was not distributed better to hospitals and nursing homes,” he said. “Somewhere there is some kind of inequity of distribution.”

One San Francisco internist argued Thursday that the delays and poor distribution of the vaccine amount to a “huge scandal.”

“You can buy heroin in San Francisco easier than you can get a flu shot,” said Dr. William Andereck, a member of the council on ethical affairs for the California Medical Assn.

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Times staff writers Julie Marquis, Christine Hanley, Jennifer Mena, Elaine Gale and Jane Allen contributed to this report.