Twice a year, the World Health Organization convenes an expert panel to decide what should go into vaccines for the coming flu season in each hemisphere, based on the highest-circulating strains. It takes six months to decide which strains to include, purify the seed ingredients, mass produce the shots in eggs and get them into vials to go into arms.
The steps add up to a sluggish ability of vaccine makers to adapt to the fast-evolving virus, meaning last year’s vaccine may not protect against this year’s strain. And the respiratory disease is highly contagious, in most cases causing fever, coughing and body aches, but potentially leading to severe complications like pneumonia.
Another part of the problem is that many flu viruses originated in birds, virologists say.
“You’re growing it in embryonated chicken eggs,” said Dr. Lynora Saxinger, an infectious diseases specialist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. “And so that’s avian cells that are growing the virus for you and the virus actually adapts to grow better in the avian cells.”
That can sometimes result in viruses that look less like what’s causing infections in humans, which can further decrease the effectiveness of influenza vaccines, said Matthew Miller, director of the Degroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont.
The article then discusses a few other technologies that are in the works, and their respective pros/cons
oh yeah mrna and crispr are two of the rare bright spots I see in technology. I mean covid was the first thing that handled it globally but it had been in production before and been in development for a long time before that. I hate when its portrayed as some sort of unsure thing. Its one of the things I got annoyed with plouribus since dna plasmids would make more sense. Honestly the chem trail thing was annoying to, its like they are trying to push the crazies buttons. Especially when water supply would have made more sense. still dna was used before that and chicken eggs are pretty antiquated at this point.
They’re not portraying it as unsure though, just new. There’s a world of difference between research, proof of concept, viable for use at scale, and viable with enough advantages to justify changing something like the flu vaccine pipeline.
Just like new doesn’t mean unsure, old doesn’t mean worse. Mrna took off because it was faster to produce for COVID, not necessarily because of any better efficacy.
mRNA vaccines are atill in use for COVID because of better efficacy.
It’s not going to be taken out of use if it’s around and effective with no significant issues, but it’s not significantly more effective.
It’s significantly easier to update as we get more information about the disease , which is why they’re very interested in them for influenza, since they won’t have to correctly predict the dominant strain based on infection metrics from six months prior in the opposite hemisphere
I was never arguing efficacy. Given the nature of vaccines that is mostly about dosage and appropriateness of the targeted protein. mrna took off because it had already been spearhead for zikha and although zikha never got to the stage where they bothered approving it the stage was set for it to be the way to go.