Doctors miss chances to give flu vaccines

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Doctors are missing plenty of opportunities to vaccinate people against influenza every year, flu shot maker Sanofi-Pasteur said on Monday.

Sanofi said it has evidence that 25 million high-risk people visited a doctor every year during recent flu seasons and did not get a flu shot.

Flu vaccine makers told a meeting in Atlanta that they plan to make more vaccine than ever before for the U.S. market, and start delivering it as early as August so people can get vaccinated as soon as possible.

And makers said they were also tweaking their vaccines to make them more appealing to consumers, with one company focusing on needle-averse schoolchildren and another offering a jab free of a controversial mercury preservative and possible allergy-provoking latex.

Flu vaccine makers say they will provide up to 146 million doses of vaccine to the U.S. market for the upcoming 2008-2009 flu season. This would cover less than half of the U.S. population but every year some vaccine gets wasted as people fail to get vaccinated.

Sanofi Pasteur Inc. said it could prepare 50 million doses for the coming flu season; Novartis said it would make 40 million; GlaxoSmithKline said it could make 35 million to 38 million doses.

Australia-based CSL Biotherapies said it was tripling its production to 6 million doses, and said 90 percent would be in prefilled syringes free of the mercury-based preservative thimerosal and also free of latex allergens.

The company said it was preparing to open a "fast filling syringe line" in Kankakee, Illinois.