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Gold/Mining/Energy : Big Dog's Boom Boom Room -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bob Swift who wrote (51456)	10/14/2005 3:22:48 AM
From: Elroy Jetson	Respond to of 206182

The entire vaccine production process needs to be revamped. Tony Fauci, head of NIAID, has been pressing the Bush admin and Congress to provide the money for this for at least the past two years. The most shocking defect in the current antique system, using duck eggs, is that it can only make vaccine for six months out of the year. The underlying problem is that, apart from national governments, there is little demand for vaccines. The month before a pandemic people would pay any price to get their hands on the correct vaccine or antiviral drug. The year before, when there's nothing in the news, the public wouldn't pay two cents for either. Thus national governments, being essentially the sole customers have to find a way to fund the conversion to a modern recombinant process. The failure of Chiron's vaccine manufacturing facility in Ireland last year really drove home how much needs to be done. From a strictly monetary perspective, drug companies would just a soon ignore both markets and pursue something profitable like a new version of Viagra. DNA vaccines for viral infections would use the DNA created after the virus has encoded the infected cell. Like all vaccines or drug targets, you would have to choose a conserved region of the virus which is unlikely to change as the virus mutates. As soon as the region of the virus, encoding the transcripted region used for the vaccine or antiviral drug, mutates the drug or vaccine becomes either less effective or even useless. But DNA vaccines would not be more or less vulnerable to drift in viral genetics than current antigen vaccines. .