CVS MinuteClinics in Austin, Texas, and New York ran out of the seasonal-flu vaccine within the past week before restocking, according to calls to 13 stores by Bloomberg News. Calls to eight Walgreen stores in Manhattan on Oct. 5 determined none had it at the time. There are also shortages in the South and Southeast, said James Cohn, a Walgreen spokesman.

Demand for seasonal-flu vaccinations has soared because of public awareness of the H1N1 virus, known as swine flu, Cohn said. Walgreen administered twice as many doses in September as in the entire 2008 flu season, he said. CVS’s clinics have vaccinated a “significantly higher number of people” than last year, said Michael DeAngelis, a spokesman.

“We are experiencing very high demand for seasonal-flu shots and we are working closely with multiple suppliers to meet this demand on a day-to-day basis,” DeAngelis said in an e-mail yesterday. “When we experience isolated shortages of vaccine supply, we do all we can to replenish these locations.”

Seasonal-flu vaccines don’t prevent swine flu, according to the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The first doses of swine flu vaccine in the U.S. were given to health-care workers and children this week.

Walgreen administered 2.5 million seasonal-flu vaccine doses last month, more than twice the 1.2 million it gave out from Oct. 1, 2008, through Feb. 28, Cohn said.

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“We are encouraging consumers to get vaccinated early,” Cohn said by telephone.

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Axel Sch., a 40 year old man with a degree in business, enrolled for the “swine flu” clinical trials at Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilians-University led by Dr Frank von Sonnenburg.

After receiving an injection on August 10th he became seriously ill.

“The injection made me sick – the test is irresponsible,” he said.

He felt the impact just a few hours after the injection, he said.

“I felt totally shattered. On the third day, I felt pain in my kidneys and head and I got a fever. Then I had a coughing fit – and my washbasin was suddenly red. It was blood.”

Sonnenburg has denied the patient’s claims, but good clinical practice requires a doctor to include all the side effects, no matter how serious to avoid falsifying data.

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