Flu vaccine shortage due to corporate greed

[Owlet]

A Biotech Company's Aggressive Move Backfires

http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041007/ZNYT01/410070810/-1/ZNYT

The company had expected that plant to supply about 50 million vaccine
doses to the United States this year, up from 26 million in 2002, when
the plant was owned by another vaccine maker.

<snip>

One question is whether the contamination problems may have been a
consequence of Mr. Pien's push to increase vaccine production quickly
at the aging factory.

"The problem was they really stressed the system this year to get to
that 50, 52 million doses," said Geoffrey C. Porges, an analyst at
Sanford C. Bernstein & Company who formerly worked in the vaccines
business at Merck.

<snip>

Mr. Pien, who was born in Taiwan and has an engineering degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an M.B.A. from Carnegie-Mellon, worked at Merck, Abbott Laboratories and SmithKline Beecham, which later became GlaxoSmithKline.

He became head of most of the SmithKline pharmaceutical business at the age of 40. His last position before joining Chiron was president of international pharmaceuticals at GlaxoSmithKline when the company, along with others, dropped a lawsuit aimed at keeping cheap copies of AIDS drugs out of South Africa.