After months of using pharma companies’ vaccine shortfall as a cudgel to complain about nefarious for-profit agendas, several governments have decided they ordered too much vaccine and now want refunds from the drug makers (France and the UK are – so far – just canceling their contracts). Apparently, demand is lower than expected and it turns out that a single dose – rather than the projected two-dose regimen -was enough to stimulate an immune response in adults.

Just to keep things straight, since the emergence of the H1N1 patient zero in Mexico last March, pharma companies in the past year were depicted as

heartless corporations that didn’t bother investing in the latest vaccine-manufacturing technologies because there’s no profit motive,

incompetents for not being able to meet the massive demand in H1N1 vaccine,

biased against developing countries for not giving away vaccine supplies in these emerging regions,

promoting autism (on the off-chance they can produce some sort of treatment for it?), and

a tool of the military-industrial-entertainment (or whatever) complex that was using vaccines as a means of implanting us all with microchips containing the mark of the beast.

And now the vaccine makers, after unprecedented efforts to meet the demands of national programs and ultimately producing a vaccine twice as effective as necessary, get to hear, “Thanks, but we didn’t really need it. Sure kept you on your toes, though!”

Naturally, any sort of panicked overreaction by governmental healthcare programs can’t possibly be their fault. Thus, a panel in Europe is also investigating whether drug makers were deliberately scaring the World Health Organization into hyping the dangers of H1N1 so that they could, um, sell more vaccine that they didn’t have the capacity to produce and would then have to take back.

It ranks among the least cost-effective conspiracies ever.

Sort of like how Donald Rumsfeld was supposed to have been behind the bird flu panic last decade as a means of boosting Tamiflu orders and getting Gilead Sciences -where he was once chairman – a spike in revenues. Because Gilead was desperate for that low-double-digit royalty it was making from its Tamiflu license to Roche; it’s not like the company’s HIV treatments were busy smashing sales records or anything.

I’m sure they’ll make the massive manufacturing technology investments necessary to meet the fire next time.

Gil Y. Roth has been the editor of Contract Pharma since its debut in 1999.