For years now, in undisclosed locations around America,
the US government has been paying for an undisclosed
number of chicken flocks in order to stockpile an
undisclosed number of chicken eggs.
This information is top-secret – a matter of national security –
all part of a larger government plan to create an
emergency stockpile of vaccines in the
event of a flu pandemic.
The reason the government had to get into the secret
chicken flock / vaccine business is because the market
for emergency vaccines is not like a regular market
for, you know, bikes or raspberries.
It is a lot weirder than that.
It is a highly, highly uncertain market, and this is a
problem because markets hate uncertainty.
Consider one of the most common vaccines
manufactured every year: the flu vaccine.
It is a fragile, delicate, expensive
process requiring thousands of chicken
eggs, and chickens only lay one egg a day,
which means you need thousands of chickens.
A live flu virus is injected into each egg.
They're gently placed on a conveyor belt.
They go into an incubator
for around ten days so that the virus
can grow in it. Then they come back out
and scientists kind of suck out the egg
white with the virus in it. That's dumped
into a spinning container that separates
any shells or particles that may have
gotten in by accident. Then they have to
kill the virus by chopping it up. Then
they wash it with detergent. By the end,
there's almost zero actual egg white
left so it's mixed in with other fluid.
That becomes the vaccine.
And in a flu emergency, you need a lot of eggs all at
once. In a pandemic influenza outbreak
you need about 900,000 chicken eggs
every single day for a six to nine month
period of time, just to make the vaccine
supply needed for the United States. Plus,
drugs and vaccines have a shelf life.
They go bad. So if an outbreak goes away
on its own, which happens sometimes,
companies can't just put all their
expensive vaccines in storage and then
wait for the next pandemic sell them.
They lose the money. So pharmaceutical
companies don't always rush to get into
the vaccine business. So in 2001, the US
government decided to become the market,
become the buyer for these vaccines.
There was an avian flu scare that year.
It seemed like it could be the next big
pandemic, and when the government tried
to get vaccines for the country in case
it got way worse, there weren't enough
vaccine doses available.
Companies weren't making them. That was not good, so
Congress created the Biomedical Advanced
Research and Development Authority – BARDA.
BARDA said hey drug companies, we
promise to buy the drugs and vaccines,
even if the outbreak goes away, let's
just make sure we have this stuff in
stock. And one of the first things BARDA
did was secure those chicken flocks to
ensure that if or when a flu pandemic
happens, the US will have enough chickens
to make enough vaccines. The information
around it is top-secret, because if the
egg supply is compromised, the United
States' vaccine supply is compromised.
And after that 2001 scare, the US government became
the buyer for all kinds of vaccines and drugs: smallpox,
anthrax, and of course, they're planning
to be the buyer for a COVID-19 vaccine.
Right now there are at least 20
companies and universities all rushing
to create a vaccine for this new coronavirus
and the US government, BARDA, has partnered with two of them.
Some companies say they already have a
vaccine candidate, but they still need to test it on human
beings. It'll likely be a year before there's a coronavirus
vaccine on the market.
There's only so much rushing that can happen because
vaccines require time.
Life needs to grow.
But when the vaccine is ready, the
government will buy it and likely keep
buying it to make sure that companies keep making it.
