Winning the vaccine lottery

The hollering up and down the halls said it all: A Park Nicollet flu clinic was the place to be this weekend for eager Twin Cities parents seeking the coveted H1N1 flu vaccine.

For the children? Not so much. But cool Band-Aids, stickers and, in some cases, even a gift from Mom and Dad as a reward, seemed to ease the sting.

After literally winning a state lottery for the vaccine doses trickling into Minnesota amid a national shortage, the St. Louis Park-based health care provider spent a long weekend inoculating children and teens at its clinics in Burnsville, St. Louis Park and Brookdale. More than 1,200 people on Saturday alone registered for swine flu shots or sprays, said Joan Sandstrom, vice president of primary care and behavioral health at Park Nicollet Health Services. Required appointments kept families from swamping waiting rooms.

"It has been very busy at all three sites," said Sandstrom, who was working Sunday. "We did bring in extra security just in case, but people have been very gracious. It is a lot of work."

Sandstrom, who is an RN, said she took a quick refresher on giving shots to kids and was pitching in.

Park Nicollet said that it plans to keep running the clinics every evening this week and into the weekend, until it runs out of the vaccine.

When that is, of course, is anybody's guess, a hospital spokesman said.

President Obama has declared the outbreak of H1N1 -- or swine flu -- a national emergency. Facing limited supplies as pharmaceutical manufacturers struggle to ramp up production of the vaccine, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta have so far allocated only about 210,000 doses for Minnesota -- far short of the estimated 2.7 million doses the state will need to hit all the priority groups, said Buddy Ferguson, a spokesman for the state Department of Health.

All in good time

Eventually, Minnesota will get what it needs, he said. When the first doses arrived here, doctors were hand-picking their most at-risk patients for vaccinations. Now, the effort has broadened.

Ferguson said the CDC allocates the vaccine to states, based on population, as the vaccine becomes available. The health department targets high-priority groups -- right now pregnant women and children 6 months to 18 years old -- and runs a lottery to see which clinic gets the supply. The doses ship directly from the distribution facility to the health care provider, frequently on short notice.

It all amounts to uncertainty for nearly everyone involved. Ferguson, for instance, couldn't say whether Park Nicollet was the only provider in the Twin Cities to have the vaccine or not.

"I haven't seen anything exactly comparable to this," he said. "But this is the first true pandemic we've had since 1968."

Most of the parents waiting Sunday at Park Nicollet's clinic in St. Louis Park said they learned by chance and word-of-mouth that it had the H1N1 vaccine -- a call from a sister, an e-mail from a friend.

"We heard our pediatrician wasn't going to have it for a while," said Sarah Hanlon of Edina, who has two young children and one on the way. "I had kind of given up."

Then a friend who had been researching the issue e-mailed Friday to tell her Park Nicollet had the vaccine, Hanlon said. It took her a half-hour to get through on the telephone trying to schedule an appointment, then she spent 20 minutes on hold, she said.

State health officials aren't expecting large amounts of the vaccine to be available until late November, Ferguson said.

"Obviously we're disappointed at the rate at which vaccine is able to be manufactured," he said.

Slow going

A key bottleneck, Ferguson said, is that making the swine flu vaccine has turned out to be more challenging than anticipated. The virus is grown inside chicken eggs, and the yield isn't what health officials anticipated.

"It isn't growing as well or as easily as hoped," Ferguson said. "It's a biological process, and it isn't always totally predictable."

The effort to ramp up production of the H1N1 vaccine caused some manufacturers to throttle back on making vaccine for the regular seasonal flu, he said, resulting in some shortages of that vaccine, too.

Bloomington-based HealthPartners Inc., which owns Regions Hospital in St. Paul, had neither vaccine this weekend, a receptionist said.

"It's really frustrating for everyone," spokesman Joe Dangor said. "We're doing the best we can."

Pregnant women, children and first responders such as police are asked to schedule appointments at one of the Park Nicollet clinics.

[Update: On Monday, Park Nicollet shut down its flu-shot hotline after it was flooded with 120,000 calls in a four-hour period, officials said. Instead, the clinic asked people seeking appointments for the H1N1 vaccine to send emails, with their names and phone numbers only, to flushot@parknicollet.com. The vaccine is only available to people in high risk groups, including pregnant women, children aged 6 months to 4 years old, and those 5 to 18 with chronic conditions or weakened immune systems.]

For more information, the Minnesota FluLine can be reached at 1-866-259-4655.

Jennifer Bjorhus • 612-673-4683