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Bird Flu Fears Stoke the Race for an mRNA Flu Vaccine
Researchers have been working on mRNA flu vaccines since before the Covid-19 pandemic, but we may get one for bird flu first.
This works reasonably well, but it takes a long time to make such jabs, which means health authorities have to publish their predictions about which strains of flu will be circulating during the upcoming winter well in advance. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, concurs, though he notes that all flu jabs, regardless of how they are made, have a waning immunity problem—your protection could decline by around 10 percent every month following injection. However, if H5N1 starts infecting a lot more people, and especially if we find that it is transmitting frequently between humans, there’s a chance that an mRNA bird flu vaccine could be the first such jab rolled out on a wide scale.
Or read this on Wired
