Platinum Year
CSL leads the vaccine fight against the Hong Kong flu
From the archives: As part of our Platinum 70 Year, we take a look back at opinions and reports from The Australian Financial Review on significant domestic and international events over the past seven decades.
The word “unprecedented” is regularly used to describe the COVID-19 pandemic, with some justification. But not everything has been a first. As this front page lead story from The Australian Financial Review of February 12, 1969 reveals, this includes the role the then government-owned Commonwealth Serum Laboratories played in developing a world-first “split vaccine” to immunise Australians against the Hong Kong influenza virus. The Hong Kong flu epidemic of 1968-69 caused an estimated 1 million to 4 million deaths globally, and led to a spike in influenza mortality in Australia, but did not kill those infected on the same scale as the Spanish flu of 1918-19.
INDUSTRY AWAITS GOVT. ON HONG KONG FLU VACCINE
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