Dr. Miller Asks, "What If?"

ACSH Trustee Dr. Henry Miller of Stanford's Hoover Institution argues in today's Washington Times that "the H1N1 immunization effort should be a wake-up call to health officials: We are woefully unprepared to deal with a true pandemic of a highly lethal virus. We need to modernize the technology used to make vaccines, so that they can be developed and manufactured more quickly. If large numbers of people were being killed by H1N1, shortages of vaccine would cause riots."

"Dr. Miller calls for more efficient vaccine production using modern techniques such as gene splicing and cell culture methods," says ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross. "These have been shown very effective in producing large amounts of vaccine, but both private drug makers and our public health authorities have been laggard in encouraging this branch of research and development. I would like to point out that we would have had many more doses if the unfounded fears of adjuvants or preservatives had been ignored by our federal health officials as they should have."