U.S. government to pay for flu vaccine campaign

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. government will pay for any vaccination program against the H1N1 swine flu, and may encourage schools to help vaccinate children, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said on Thursday.

The government is also considering buying even more antiviral drugs, including more of GlaxoSmithKline's inhaled drug Relenza and pediatric doses of Roche AG's Tamiflu, officials told a swine flu "summit" at the National Institutes of Health.

Sebelius said plans were on track for a mid-October vaccination program, and she urged states and territories to get plans in place now. It will likely run alongside the annual seasonal flu vaccine campaign and may include schools and other non-traditional sites as vaccination centers.

"At mid-October we might have as much as 100 million doses of vaccine," HHS vaccine expert Dr. Bruce Gellin told the meeting.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said clinical trials would likely begin in August to make sure the new H1N1 vaccines are safe, and to see which dose will be best. "All of this seems to be pretty much on schedule but when you are dealing with vaccines, anything can happen," Fauci said in an interview.

The state health officials at the meeting said they hoped that years of planning for a pandemic were now starting to pay off, and President Barack Obama echoed that sentiment.

"We may end up averting a crisis. That's our hope," Obama told the summit by video link from the G8 meeting of industrial nations in Italy.

The new virus, which has infected at least a million Americans and which the World Health Organization has designated a pandemic, has killed more than 400 people globally since it emerged in March. It looks mild now -- seasonal flu kills up to 500,000 people in a normal year -- but could change as it circulates.