The experts recommended that seasonal and pandemic vaccines can be administered simultaneously, provided both vaccines are inactivated, or one is inactivated and the other is live attenuated.
Thiomersal is a compound used to prevent bacterial and fungal growth in some inactivated (in which the virus has been killed) vaccines provided to countries in multi-dose vials.
Production of the live vaccines requires much less chicken embryos than the traditional inactivatedvaccines, which allows large-scale production and massive storage, Chen said.