Malta has ordered the right amount of swine flu vaccines, health director general Ray Busuttil said yesterday, as EU member states attempted to offload their own orders due to sluggish demand for the jab.
Dr Busuttil does not believe the island has an oversupply. "We have ordered one dose for every person and, in the case of the elderly, two doses as recommended by the World Health Organisation. We should not end up with extra stock," he said.
He is also optimistic that neither will there be any need to order extra stock if the take-up of the national vaccination programme goes ahead as planned.
Malta placed its order for 425,000 jabs with the British pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline after its agreement with The Netherlands for supply fell through last in December.
After the initial delivery of 100,000 last month, the whole stock would have arrived by the end of February and the government does not plan to buy any more.
By 1 p.m. yesterday, 18,234 chronic patients, pregnant workers and healthcare staff had been vaccinated in the first stage of the programme, targeted at medical workers and so-called vulnerable people. The population should start being jabbed once the next batch arrives.
The picture in terms of vaccine stock in the rest of Europe, where at least 28 million people have been vaccinated so far, is quite different.
France, Germany, The Netherlands and the UK yesterday confirmed they were trying to offload millions of jabs by selling them to developing countries. They are also putting pressure on pharmaceutical companies to cancel pending orders without paying penalties.
Governments are being accused of having rushed to order vaccines months ago only in the interest of the pharmaceutical industry. Several are facing accusations of overestimating the need and demand for the jabs, so they are in a frenzy to sell or cancel millions of H1N1 inoculations ordered from pharmaceutical companies.
Low participation in national vaccination programmes, a relatively milder than expected impact of the virus and a change in the dose needed, have meant several member states are lumped with millions of euros worth of stocks.
The European Commission yesterday admitted its member states overreacted to the flu pandemic and said it was coordinating their efforts to sell the extra stock.
Experts are saying the winter peak has not brought the much-feared wave of infections. However, although the number of new cases of swine flu around the EU appeared to have peaked, the WHO said central and eastern Europe was still grappling with the worst of the pandemic including Greece, Poland, Bulgaria, Serbia, Ukraine and the Urals region of the Russian Federation.
According to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, just over 1,700 fatal cases of H1N1 influenza were recorded in the EU and European Free Trade Association countries to date.