5 ms·

“A universal influenza vaccine would be a major public health achievement and could eliminate the need for both annual development of seasonal influenza vaccine

• xienze 3y ago
  > So, one shot and no more flu? ever? Why even take a shot? If results from 2020/2021 are to be believed, all it took was some half-hearted masking to practically eliminate the flu from the face of the earth.
  • cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    yes well it's not like there haven't been public health campaigns for decades asking people to wash their hands and not cough on each other and stay home when sick if possible... and people ignored them It took a pandemic where people were basically a) scared for their lives and b) threatened with bylaw and legal ramifications, to actually get them to respond to civic health concerns and comply.
    • landemva 3y ago
      I was 'critical infrastructure' and didn't stay home. Work trucks kept rolling. I wasn't scared. I didn't 'voluntarily' comply with operation warp speed. Visits to mine sites were glorious because MSHA didn't promote the OSHA theatrics. My child and I were invited to the yearly pig roast for workers and family at one mine, and it was awesome. We then drove back to big city and unfortunately went to grocery store seemingly in a different world of masked gloved stink-eye scared shoppers wiping down their soup cans.
      • cmrdporcupine 3y ago
        ... and.... I don't care?
  • Madmallard 3y ago
    Yeah masking was definitely not the reason. It was people staying home.
• mjevans 3y ago
  Sign me up for this, I want a shot that's got a reasonable chance of being effective even if I need it every year or two.
  • SoftTalker 3y ago
    I'm the opposite. I have zero interest in this. I've never had a flu vaccine in my life. I've had the flu maybe once. And I'm nearly 60.
    • amanaplanacanal 3y ago
      Some sort of natural immunity maybe? I realized several years ago that I was getting the flu every year unless I got the shot, and it always kicked my ass. I did skip the shots over the Covid years though. On the other hand, I’ve managed to avoid getting HSV-1 even though it seems like everybody else in my age bracket (over 60) has it. Must be something genetic.
• ptdn 3y ago
  It does mention a hope for long-term durable immune response, but the point about being able to pre-emptively roll out a universal vaccine is probably more important. This would lower the total rate of infections by a lot and allow people to reliably get a useful vaccine without waiting to see which strains are dominant that year. (Also, an immune response doesn't mean complete immunity. mRNA Covid vaccines don't prevent you from getting Covid. It lowers the severity and spread.)
  • landemva 3y ago
    > mRNA Covid vaccines don't prevent you from getting Covid. A couple years ago typing that would get accounts banned on most sites.
    • ptdn 3y ago
      Don't look at me. I was screaming about COVID in January 2020. The lib moral panic changing directions on a dime without a change in intensity was disorienting.
      • anshorei 3y ago
        Jan 2020 club checking in :-) I remember joking about a big pandemic being around the corner at my families New Year's party. Back then it was a few vague rumors from Chinese doctors that I was keeping an eye on but not taking seriously yet. It's been crazy how much "always been at war with Eastasia/Eurasia" I've seen people around me engage in.
        • ptdn 3y ago
          Social media delenda est. Reputation systems, politico-cultural tribalism, and human cognitive vulnerability w/r/t viral information have turned the entire cultural landscape into anarcho-1984.
• mc32 3y ago
  That would be nice… recent history would tell us those claims are wildly optimistic.
  • maxerickson 3y ago
    It's easy to nay say, the COVID mRNA vaccines were great, it's nuts that people hold them to some imagined standard. Like a single dose is less effective than multiple doses, especially if later doses are targeted at the circulating virus, but the first shot has an enormous protective effect, alerting the immune system to the type of virus.
    • junofan 3y ago
      Downvoted because the standard was not imagined; public messaging was blasted worldwide at EUA and revised downwards over time as more received the vaccine, damaging public trust in vaccination campaigns.
      • Touche 3y ago
        Can you link to some of that messaging where the claims were not met? Thanks.
        • thallium205 3y ago
          Here you go: https://twitter.com/pbhushan1/status/1451807240659161090/mediaViewer?currentTweet=1451807240659161090&currentTweetUser=pbhushan1 https://twitter.com/pbhushan1/status/1451807240659161090/med...
          • revelio 3y ago
            That's been memory holed but here's a similar one: https://twitter.com/ITGuy1959/status/1581034815700488192 https://twitter.com/ITGuy1959/status/1581034815700488192
        • nomel 3y ago
• adastra22 3y ago
  Only if you vaccinate all the wild animals that carry it too.
• dannyw 3y ago
  *Until the flu variants mutate to be more vaccine resistant.
  • CyberDildonics 3y ago
    I'm pretty sure that's already the problem.
  • jewayne 3y ago
    Viruses don't "resist" vaccines, because vaccines don't act directly against viruses. We're not talking about antibiotics here.
    • nomel 3y ago
      This is false: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_resistance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_resistance And probably a semantic misunderstanding.
• francisduvivier 3y ago
  Well that's how they make it sound, but they actually just said not annually. But it doesn't make a lot of sense to me since influenza will be mutating to escape the immune response.
  • weaksauce 3y ago
    > But it doesn't make a lot of sense to me since influenza will be mutating to escape the immune response. unless there is sufficient number of people that take it and it works well enough to eradicate it like say polio was.
    • palebluedot 3y ago
      Given the anti-vaccine resurgence, I think it is unlikely for the flu vaccine update to reach that sort of critical mass.
      • wsc981 3y ago
        Especially now that governments don’t want to aid people financially that got harmed by the vaccines, since getting a vaccine was voluntarily [0]. It’s not like governments stated that the vaccines are both safe and effective and indirectly put pressure on people to get the vaccine, after all. ——— [0]: https://www-geenstijl-nl.translate.goog/5170466/ja-ja/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://www-geenstijl-nl.translate.goog/5170466/ja-ja/?_x_tr...
    • pixl97 3y ago
      Flu commonly comes from animal carriers, such as birds and swine, so I'm not sure if wiping it from humans will ever eradicate the disease.
    • revelio 3y ago
      Polio wasn't eradicated.
  • ABCLAW 3y ago
    >But it doesn't make a lot of sense to me since influenza will be mutating to escape the immune response Not all mutations are equal; the flu has antigenic factors that rapidly change in response to evolutionary pressure that don't significantly affect the fitness of the virus. If you're able to target another element of the virus that is conserved, or target a large segment of the possible antigenic conformations in a single vaccine, you'd force immune evasion mutations to significantly lower the virus's fitness, which is a very big deal.
• Someone1234 3y ago
  Unfortunately the only real answer to that is: We don't have the data on either question yet. Hemagglutinin has 18 subtypes, this style of vaccines are targeting them all, but we don't have data on how complete coverage will be (and or how common a mutation exists that could allow partial of complete circumvention). We also don't have data on how long before the immune system needs to be retrained (aka re-vaccinated). This isn't to foo-foo this vaccine; this legitimately could create a "universal" vaccine that could last years with only some minor reformulation every so often to catch new sub-types of HA. TL;DR: This thing could be great. We'll need more data to know.
  • runsWphotons 3y ago
    Is there any reason to think the immunity would last? Like is there evidence in animals? Because the one mRNA vaccine we gave had in people did not provide much immunity past three months. That was in environment of virus mutating, but so will the flu.
    • MAGZine 3y ago
      one thing that's important to remember is that there are degrees of immunity. ending up with a cough is very different ending up in a hospital, needing a ventilator. people forget that flu vaccines are important: many people die from the flu every year. even if flu vaccines don't 'last' in the sense that they might not stop you from getting any sort of sick, they almost certainly are effective in preventing major illness.
      • runsWphotons 3y ago
        Sure, but there are still tons of questions and tradeoffs.
    • jefftk 3y ago
      > the one mRNA vaccine we gave had in people did not provide much immunity past three months That's much more about the virus than the vaccine type, no? The non-mRNA vaccines acted similarly.
• viraptor 3y ago
  "no annual" doesn't mean "just one". Lots of vaccines wear off after a few years and need a booster. (There's lots of people who don't know about it / don't get reminded and never get them)
  • gweinberg 3y ago
    So we'll only need them in election years? Umm, I mean leap years?
• ortusdux 3y ago
  I'm not a doctor/immunologist, but as I understand it the flu shot targets 4-5 different strains. Each year they have to ID what they believe will be this season's leading strains, and then blend together the mix ahead of time. This takes a lot of work, and sometimes they get it wrong and 8th most common strain surges and it's a scramble to save lives. So I think the promise of a 'universal' vaccine means one that would target all/most strains.
  • Izkata 3y ago
    Yep, this is why you're supposed to get them every year - it's extremely rare for a new strain of influenza to appear (we're talking like 3-5 in the past century IIRC), but rather than attempt to have everyone keep track of which ones they've gotten the shot for, it's easier to just tell everyone to get the current one. Because of this scattershot approach it's also not clear how long it actually lasts. This is also one of the main reasons mRNA is supposed to be such a huge boon to vaccinations: one of the major reasons so few are targeted each year is manufacturing costs.
    • landemva 3y ago
      > you're supposed to get them every year I'm physically active, no big health issues, and my Dr. says I don't need it.
      • klyrs 3y ago
        That described me when I got a flu that kicked my ass with a high fever for a few weeks and career-impacting brain fog that lasted a couple of years. Your doc is right, you don't need it; you'll survive. But if your brain is your moneymaker, be warned that death isn't the only possible long term side effect.
• jewayne 3y ago
  No. The goal is one shot that doesn't have to change from year to year. We already know that the flu doesn't have a long enough incubation period for humans to gain lifetime immunity. Which means that even if this vaccine works and is effective against all flu viruses past, present, and future, it will probably still be a good idea to get a universal flu booster every year.
  • amluto 3y ago
    I’m not convinced that mRNA vaccines as they currently exist are well suited for repeated boosting against the same virus. See, for example: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciimmunol.adg7327 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciimmunol.adg7327 And also the quite disappointing efficacy that the CDC reports for repeated Covid boosters.
    • tptacek 3y ago
      Is the Covid issue mRNA, though, or is it how much of a moving target they were trying to hit with the bivalent booster?
      • bluGill 3y ago
        The flu mutates more readily than COVID. With the sudden spread of COVID around the world we saw a few mutations, but the flu would mutate a lot more given the same spread. Most of us have some flu immunity though and that tends to limit spread, so it seems there are less mutations.
        • XorNot 3y ago
          Right but that varies from virus to virus - the goal of a universal flu vaccine is to hit a well-conserved region of the virus which doesn't mutate much. Our inability to do it so far doesn't necessarily imply it's impossible. Whereas most current COVID vaccines target the spike, and disappointingly the spike is a lot more malleable then hoped.
• api 3y ago
  In practice: one shot or possibly one shot every few years and you have about 50-75% less chance of getting influenza. If enough people get it it could increase herd immunity further reducing your chances of getting it. I’ll take it. Antivaxxers will of course find some other explanation for the reduction in flu cases or point to the people who still get it as proof the vaccine doesn’t work.
• b0sk 3y ago
  Yea, if there's suddenly no evolution in the universe.
• elif 3y ago
  Potentially. Especially the AI folded mrna vaccines which have an order of magnitude or better immune response and persistence.
• Madmallard 3y ago
  Highly doubtful