Donates Doses of Swine Flu Vaccine

Sanofi-Aventis SA will donate 100 million doses of swine-flu vaccine to the World Health Organization.
Once production of a vaccine begins, Sanofi will reserve 10 percent of output for the donations, the Paris-based company said today in a statement. The donation will help ensure that the poorest countries have access to the shots, Sanofi said.
“ It’s a call for collective action,” Sanofi Chief Executive Officer Chris Viehbacher said in a telephone interview from Seattle today. “We all have to play our part. It can’t be only the rich countries having access to the vaccines, in case of a pandemic.” GlaxoSmithKline Plc also plans to donate 50 million doses to the WHO, spokesman Stephen Rea said in an interview today.
The decisions by Sanofi and Glaxo contrast with that of Novartis AG, which said this week it wouldn’t donate the vaccine. The Basel, Switzerland-based company may look at pricing and other ways to assure access, spokesman Eric Althoff said today in a telephone interview. Donations won’t address the current pandemic or create sustainable access, Althoff said.
“In principle, I agree that you don’t want to rely on donations, they are not a sustainable model,” Viehbacher said. “But a pandemic is an exceptional event, it’s not on-going. We have to do what we can to help the WHO fight it.” The decision won’t affect Sanofi’s margins, he said.
H1N1 Cases
The spread of the swine flu virus, formally known as H1N1, helped push the WHO on June 11 to declare the first flu pandemic in four decades, and the agency is urging drugmakers to begin producing shots. The agency said today that 35,928 cases of the virus, including 163 deaths, have been reported in 76 countries.
In most cases H1N1 causes little more than a fever and cough. Still, governments have ordered millions of vaccine doses as health officials watch for signs the virus could mutate into a more dangerous form in the Southern Hemisphere’s winter.
Wealthy nations need to ensure that poor countries have access to vaccine during the pandemic, Margaret Chan, the WHO’s director-general, said last week at a press briefing.
Sanofi said it will also consider a tiered-pricing policy for developing countries should its vaccine plants become fully committed to the production of swine-flu vaccine.
Australian drugmaker CSL Ltd. and Baxter International Inc. of Deerfield, Illinois, also are producing shots to prevent the virus.