Going Viral

It's that time of year again, when people start asking themselves, and each other, whether to get a flu shot. I actually get asked this question a lot, presumably because I have a background in science, and I used to work in a plant that manufactured the flu vaccine. People also ask me if I think vaccines are safe, given my up-close experience with making them. The short answer is somewhat contradictory: yes they are safe, and no you probably don't need one (though many doctors will send me hate mail for the latter part of that statement). While I have fond memories of helping to make the flu vaccine (which was my first job out of college), I've also developed a sort-of working rationale against their utility.

It was not my fondest wish to work in a factory after college; most of my friends were heading off to graduate school or taking office jobs. I had hoped that my molecular biology degree would translate into a spot in some pristine lab at Merck or Johnson & Johnson, both of which have corporate headquarters in my hometown. Instead, I ended up in a vaccine manufacturing plant (I'm withholding the name due to a confidentiality agreement I signed before going to work there). Because I had some lab experience, they stuck me in the formulation facility. That's where all of a vaccine's given ingredients are pooled into one giant stainless-steel vat before being sent down the production line and packaged into the individual shots that most people get injected with at one point or another.

Despite the hint of manual labor in my official job title—manufacturing technician—it sounded exciting when I first signed on. It was early in the millennium, and a rash of quality-control problems had forced plants in Europe and the U.S. to suspend their influenza programs, leading to a colossal shortage of flu vaccines. When it came time to make that season's batch (after the Centers for Disease Control had selected the appropriate virus strains) ours was one of only two companies in the nation with the FDA approval needed to get the job done. Even though we mixed and stirred and blended hundreds of thousands of gallons of virus in a single season, we knew it would not be quite enough to inoculate the masses. As we went into overdrive (and overtime), expanding our campus and ramping up production to some 150 million doses (and that was just for influenza), public-health experts across the country were calling for more factories and more vaccines. Talk about a sense of urgency.

It was a fun place to work, though I probably wouldn't have said that at the time. We started at 6 a.m. sharp, which for me meant getting up at 4:30 to make the hourlong commute. The upside was that because we spent the whole day covered from head to toe in sterile gowns, there was no need to bother with hair, makeup or fancy clothes. After a quick breakfast in the cafeteria, we spent most of the morning just preparing to enter the dense cubicle bunkers where the actual formulating took place. That meant sterilizing everything, including ourselves.

Moving from the cafeteria through the locker rooms and hallways to the inner sanctum of the formulating rooms involved a series of clothing changes we called "gowning up." First we changed from street clothes to scrubs. This included putting on special work shoes that never left the building. Passing from the locker rooms into the lab area meant covering those shoes with paper booties and donning a hairnet, safety goggles and at least one layer of latex gloves. Except for our own skin, which we couldn't do anything about except cover, nothing that had seen the outside world, not even jewelry, was allowed beyond that point.

Scrubs were OK for wiping down equipment—which we did obsessively, throughout the day, with 95 percent bleach—or standing in the hallways. But going into the formulating rooms required a whole extra layer of clothing, a layer that had been autoclaved (cooked in a steel vessel under pressures and temperatures high enough to kill any and all microbes) and packaged just so.

Getting into that clothing actually took practice: no portion of the outside of the jumpsuit could touch you, the walls or the floor. The formulating rooms were completely sterile. If you gowned up the wrong way and if even a single bacterium had managed to sneak past all those other security checkpoints, you might introduce contamination. So you had to open the package and remove the jumpsuit and hood without touching the outfit's outside. Then, you would carefully unroll the legs of the suit while stepping into them so that they did not touch the floor, even for a second.