Vincent Racaniello

Last week the Times ran a story by Andrew Pollack, Benefit and Doubt in Vaccine Additive, that covered some of the ground I trod in my Slate story, "To Boost or Not to Boost: The United States' swine flu vaccines will leave millions worldwide unprotected. Pollack also had the room to explore something I lacked room for -- the fascinating history of adjuvants, and the strange mystery of how they work. Like so many things that work in medicine, adjuvants were discovered more or less by accident -- and were in fact a "dirty little secret" in a fairly literal sense. As the Wikipedia entry…

My latest piece for Slate examines the unsettling consequences of the United States' choice of swine flu vaccines. The good news about these vaccines is that, to judge by the first vaccine trial results, published last week, they appear to work fast, safely â and at about a half to a quarter of the doses that the CDC expected. This means we effectively have about two to four times as many vaccines as we had figured we would. Since we ordered 195 million doses, we could vaccinate damn near the whole country. If the fast-tracking efforts continue to work and the flu peaks closer to Christmas…