Vaccine Grey Market

As word of the vaccine trouble flashed across the country (see above), public-health officials were forced into a mad scramble trying to retrieve all Cutter vaccine. In the process, they turned up an unappetizing picture of some doctors who had handed out the vaccine as they pleased, without regard for suggested priorities.

About 1,000,000 shots of the Cutter vaccine had been shipped, and 300,000 given to children in mass inoculation programs. But the company was one of those that had shipped out a few thousand other doses for commercial distribution as a come-on to win doctors' goodwill. To New York went some 2,200 packages (of three doses each), 1,114 of them to New York City. City health-department inspectors found that 250 physicians had acquired 526 packages privately, and 211 of these doctors had given at least 300 injections to patients of their own choice. Of the first 108 precisely checked, 91 had gone to persons under 20, but 17 adults (including several pregnant women) had also received shots. Moreover, 80 packages had been handed out as largesse to employees of the drug houses and their friends and relatives.

From adjacent Nassau County, Medical Society President Stuart Potter snorted: "Shocking and deplorable." Vice President Samuel Freedman of the New York County Medical Society said that the situation "is to be deplored and is not condoned." The city's board of health jammed through an amendment to the sanitary code, stipulating that doctors' prescriptions must show the age of each patient to receive the vaccine. "This," said an official, "is to shame the doctors into following the voluntary priority."

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