Germans order vaccine as H1N1 arrives, perhaps too late

Jul 24, 2009, 14:01 GMT

Berlin - With swine flu spreading fast, Germany placed an order Friday for 50 million doses of vaccine, but a professor warned that most of the country would probably get sick before the medicine arrived.

After weeks of debate about the financing, the 16 German states placed a joint order for the vaccine. The cost, 700 million euros (1 billion dollars), is to be recouped by billing patients or health insurers for each shot.

The vaccine is expected to arrive in October. At two doses per person, it would immunize 30 per cent of Germany's 80 million people.

Alexander Kekule, a virologist, scoffed at the plan, saying most people would not need vaccination because by then it would be too late. With up to 3,000 infections so far, most Germans would catch H1N1 this summer and autumn and recover, he suggested.

Kekule, who is a professor at the University of Halle and Wittenberg, told NDR Info radio, 'Germany has ordered its vaccine relatively late. Some other countries did it earlier.

'I would assume we won't be vaccinating on a grand scale till November or even later,' he said, saying the two doses must be administered a month apart. 'By that time, a large number of people will have got over the infection.'

Kekule said he expected some deaths, but added that other types of influenza killed several thousand people annually in Germany.

'We've got used to that, and the swine flu will merge into it and make it a bit worse,' he said.

However Germany's top infectious-diseases official, Joerg Hacker, suggested H1N1 would not spread much faster than the current pace of about 1,000 new cases every two days.

'I expect it to stay at that scale,' said Hacker at his office, the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, adding that most German victims were still catching the illness abroad, not passing it to one another inside Germany.

He said H1N1 remained an illness that most people should stay home to recover from. They only needed to go to hospital if they had extremely bad cases, he said.