News Release

HHS Assists States With Another Antiviral Drug Purchase

HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt today announced a contract award with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) to provide zanamivir (Relenza®) to all 50 states, the District of Columbia, five U.S. territories and three Freely Associated States of the Pacific at a federally subsidized price. The contract will run for a period of two years with an initial contract award amount of $16,833,000.

"Today's announcement is another example of how we all must share in the responsibility to prepare our nation and its communities to respond to a pandemic flu outbreak," Secretary Leavitt said. "As we emphasized at summit meetings across the country, it will take everyone working together to be ready when a pandemic flu outbreak occurs here."

Under the HHS contract, 59 jurisdictions will be able to purchase at federally negotiated price from GSK and will receive a 25 percent federal subsidy for a prescribed number of treatment courses. A complete table of projected antiviral purchases and subsidized allocations for all jurisdictions is posted online at http://www.pandemicflu.gov/state/antivirals.html.

The contract allows states to purchase up to 15.5 million antiviral treatment courses as part of the HHS program to assure that the country has stockpiles to cover at least 25 percent of the U.S. population. The jurisdictions' part of the overall stockpile program, as outlined in the online allocation table, totals 31 million treatment courses. In addition to these 31 million federally-subsidized, state-purchased treatment courses of antiviral drugs -- which will reside in the states -- the federal government will purchase 44 million antiviral treatment courses for state use which will be stored in the Strategic National Stockpile.

More information on pandemic preparedness including the latest HHS funding announced earlier this month for state and local pandemic influenza preparedness planning can be found online at www.pandemicflu.gov.

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Note: All HHS press releases, fact sheets and other press materials are available at http://www.hhs.gov/news.

Last revised: July 20, 2006