"... and there is more and more of it"
I've been reading that researchers have come up with a way to combine genetic markers from that Avian flu that everyone's worrying about, with gold particles to form what could best be desribed as a "mist" that, in human tests, is as effective or more effective than vaccines cultured in the usual manner, involving eggs. It's been said that a batch of 150 million could be produced in a matter of weeks, instead of months or more.
That would certainly put a crimp in supply. It bears watching, I'd think.
Very interesting. That would be a legitimate reason for gold prices to rise.
The quantities of gold we are talking about here is relatively insignificant. The lovely thing about gold for purposes like this is that a little bit goes a very long way. Annual gold production is on the order of 2.5 million kilos. The amount required to do anything like what you are talking about falls way under the noise floor of annual production variances and could be trivially covered by borrowing an tiny fraction of the national gold reserves in an emergency (which outstrip annual worldwide production by more than an order of magnitude).
In short, this would have no impact on gold supply. Producing a super-massive batch of vaccines would require gold quantities measured in kilograms, while annual production (never mind existing supplies) can be measured in thousands of tons.