They don't care about the facts.
Chiron bought Powderject in 2003. With Powderject came the factort in question:
http://stg.syndnet.thomsonfn.com/InvestorRelations/PubNewsStory.aspx?partner=5425&storyId=97611 Total third-quarter 2003 revenues for PowderJect Pharmaceuticals, which Chiron acquired during the third quarter
http://www.science-enterprise.ox.ac.uk/html/PaulDrayson.asp (Powderject CEO)
After a year we identified our first target - a British pharmaceutical company, Medeva, that had been acquired by Celtech. Medeva contained a drug business and a vaccine business. ...we acquired Medeva in 2000. It employed about 600 people on a 14-acre site in Liverpool and its most important product was a flu vaccine.”
http://www.iht.com/articles/542541.htmlContamination problems were not new to the plant. Polio vaccines made there by Medeva, another previous owner, before 1996 were recalled in October 2000 after British authorities said they might be contaminated with mad cow disease. In 1999, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration notified Medeva that there were risks of contamination in the flu vaccine produced at the plant.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,386177,00.htmlMartin Bright and Antony Barnett
Sunday October 22, 2000
The Observer
The drug factory at the centre of the polio vaccine scandal has a history of contamination and production blunders, leading to fears that its vaccines against other diseases are unsafe.
<snip>
The lives of thousands of old people and children have been put at risk by drug shortages caused by a catalogue of problems that have plagued the Medeva vaccines plant on Merseyside. <snip>
Last year, investigators from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) were horrified by the conditions they found at the plant in Speke, near Liverpool, which also makes vaccines against flu, tuberculosis, tetanus and Hepatitis B.
<snip>
. A week-long inspection by the FDA last summer into the production of the flu vaccine Fluvirin at the plant found Medeva had failed to:
• 'clean, maintain and sanitise equipment at appropriate intervals to
prevent malfunction or contamination';
• maintain systems to prevent unacceptable levels of toxins and
bacteria contaminating the production process;
• ensure batches of vaccines 'conformed with all established
standards, specifications and characteristics'; and
• prove that vaccines on doctors' shelves would be free from
'bacteria and fungi'.
<snip>
The FDA letter, seen by The Observer , contains the disclosure that
instead of dealing with the problems, managers at the plant wanted to
raise the level of contamination deemed to be acceptable.
<snip>
The troubled Speke plant has changed hands twice over the past year.
When the problems were first identified by the FDA, it was owned by
Medeva Pharma, which was bought by Celltech in January. Just last
month, the vaccine business was sold on to Oxford-based Powderject and
is now called Evans Vaccines.
<snip>
The FDA confirmed that it had not reinspected the plant since its October warning letter, but was satisfied that problems were now being dealt with. It has authorised the import of the flu vaccine this year.
A spokeswoman said: 'The FDA would not allow this vaccine to enter this country if it was not safe.'
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
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