Oleg Kiselyov, the director of the St. Petersburg-based Influenza Research Institute, told a news conference, "We were supposed to prepare the vaccine by the migration time but it looks as if we will not succeed."
Kiselyov had earlier said production would begin in April and told journalists at the news conference that officials dealing with the process were to blame for the delay.
On a more optimistic note, the flu expert said a national-scale production project would be considered at a Thursday conference led by the country's chief doctor, Gennady Onishchenko, and added that the institute would start independently putting out small batches of the vaccine regardless of what was decided at the meeting.
Kiselyov said the institute did not yet have a sample of H5N1 strain of the virus that had caused fatalities in Turkey, and did not rule out that the institute would have to reorient its work to producing a vaccine for the Turkish strain instead of the one first discovered in Vietnam.
Russia registered its first bird flu cases in Siberian fowl last summer and saw the virus spread west of the Urals into its European territory in October. However, no cases of human infection have been reported.
