The Food and Drug Administration has approved the new H1N1 vaccine.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told Congress a limited number of doses may be distributed in early October, with a bulk shipment in the middle of that month.

This year’s response to H1N1 marks one of the fastest research and development phases of an influenza vaccine. In an interview earlier this month, Jay Butler, MD, director of the CDC’s H1N1 Vaccine Task Force told me:

I think the news is really good in terms of what we’ve been saying over the past several years — how we’ve planned, particularly at the state level, for the next pandemic. We’ve anticipated that a vaccine wouldn’t be available for about six to nine months after the first cases are identified. If, indeed, we can be getting vaccine out to the public by mid-October, we’re actually a little bit ahead of schedule.

Public health officials first discovered this H1N1 outbreak in April.

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