Nov. 4--A medical distributor on Tuesday said that his company did not receive enough seasonal flu vaccine to completely fill an order in Connecticut, and that demand for the vaccine in the Northeast and elsewhere has been sky-high.

But Joseph Schulmann, president of ABO Pharmaceuticals of San Diego, said that the company has not jacked up the price of seasonal flu vaccine and that he honored the contracted price of $10.89 per dose on the order he shipped to Connecticut earlier this year.

Schulmann was responding Tuesday to a query from state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal about whether vaccine makers and distributors were price gouging.

On Monday, Blumenthal said his office had received reports from nursing agencies, doctors, hospitals, and clinics about seasonal flu vaccine costing as much as $100 a dose -- up from $7 a dose less than a year ago. Blumenthal wrote to 13 companies asking about pricing and whether any aspect of their distribution methods was favoring drugstores and other major retailers over clinics and nonprofit health agencies.

"I don't know anything about price gouging," Schulmann said in a telephone interview. "I know that in the past, there was low compliance among nurses and doctors who were required to get vaccinated. This year, it seems like they all did. In New York, tens of thousands [of health practitioners] were vaccinated. I received some desperate calls about supplies, but we were shorted by the manufacturer."

Blumenthal said the complaints received by his office were "credible reports of potential price gouging."

"We hope, if there is any wrongdoing, that it is by only a minority of manufacturers and distributors." Blumenthal said Tuesday. "We'll seek to verify the information given by [Schulmann] and await the explanations of the other companies."

Schulmann said that because of the short supply of seasonal flu vaccine, he was able to send only 70 percent of an order to a Connecticut health agency in April, but he said he stuck to the original price. He said he knows that vaccine makers have shifted to production of H1N1, "but I still don't know why that has cut so deeply into the production of the seasonal flu vaccine."

A spokeswoman for MedImmune Vaccines Inc. of Gaithersburg, Md. -- one of the manufacturers contacted by Blumenthal -- said the company has "met all of its production goals" for seasonal flu vaccine and has not changed its price this season.

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