DPH assures enough flu vaccines for high-risk patients

The Department of Public Health admitted yesterday that the CNMI lacks enough flu vaccines to treat its population of over 75,000.

DPH Medical Director Dr. Richard J. Brostrom said, however, that there is actually no shortage since health agencies use a formula to determine the amount of vaccine stored in their pharmacies.

Brostrom said the number of flu vaccines carried by a certain locale is based on its population ratio.

“The vaccine we get is based on the population formula,” he said, “We get the same amount of vaccine per capita that the rest of the United States gets.”

Brostrom said that all territories under U.S. jurisdiction, including all the states in the Union, do not receive enough flu vaccines to vaccinate everyone, even if cases are of high-risk categories, so DPH really has to select those whom they think are of the highest risk.

Brostrom said that, right now, the DPH and the Community Health Center only has less than 200 flu vaccines.

He said that small amount is already a lot, considering that DPH and CHC tries to dispense as many of the flu vaccines as possible for people who need them most, which includes the elderly and diabetics.

“In general, we are not given enough flu vaccines to cover the [entire] population; in fact, we don’t have enough [flu] vaccine to cover all our high-risk patients,” he said.

High-risk patients, according to Brostrom, are individuals who are over 60, those who suffer from diabetes, young children with lung problems and repeated asthma, and adults and children with significant heart conditions.

He said there are more chronic diseases and diabetes cases in the U.S., so that health agencies have to be careful and be sure that only high-risk people receive flu vaccines.

Brostrom said that, due to the shortage of flu vaccines, the DPH has to determine who among its high-risk patients need them most. He said though, that through this process they have distributed more than 85 percent of the flu vaccines they received for the year.

Although the U.S. mainland could afford public hospitals not carrying sufficient flu vaccines, the same could not be said for the CNMI. He said that, in the continental U.S., there are a lot of private clinics that have flu vaccines, but in the CNMI there are only a handful of private clinics to source the flu vaccines from.

“So we are left with the government to supply us more flu vaccines,” said Brostrom.