英伦广角 2009-07-19 猪流感疫苗安全吗？（在线收听）

As the pandemic grows, so too does the pressure to provide a vaccine, the first samples of the swine flu jab should be ready for trials next month. But it’s emerged that the vaccine will be made available to the NHS before the full results of those trials are known and some doctors worry the process is being rushed.

I’m very concerned that a vaccine might be brought out too quickly. There is a huge demand for it from doctors and patients and yet it hasn’t been fully tested. We know from the past that these types of vaccines can cause neurological disorders and there is an overall concern that if the vaccine is used too soon it may have more problems than swine flu itself.

Scientists have been working on a swine flu jab since April. The government's placed advanced orders for up to 132 million doses . W hen it’s delivered, there will be trials involving between 200 and 400 patients. But will the vaccine be safe? Government scientists are adamant that it will.Three core vaccines on which this one will be based have been trialed successfully on thousands of people and a new vaccine will have to pass a rigorous licensing process before it’s used on the public.

The way that you work with a pandemic vaccine is that you don't know what the pandemic vaccines are going to be,so you make a core vaccine which has happened in this case. You perform clinical trials on that and the core vaccines for those we will get for the, in this pandemic have gone through clinical trials on between 5000 and 6000 people.

The Department of Health has branded the safety claims irresponsible and says they will cause unnecessary panic. 60 million doses of vaccine will be available by Christmas, enough to immunize half the UK population and any new vaccine will be thoroughly tested before it’s used.

Simon Newton, Sky News