Quote: The Food and Drug Administration approved Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine this week — a major public health breakthrough for an administration that’s been troublingly down on vaccines.
The flu is a gigantic and costly illness, causing 1 billion infections and 300,000 deaths each year. But this new shot, built on advances from the Covid-19 pandemic, is expected to outperform the standard flu vaccine that we've used, largely unchanged, for the past 80 years.
The new shot fixes a problem that has long bedeviled the traditional vaccine: the gap between how quickly the flu virus mutates and how slowly vaccines are produced. The flu is changing constantly. But under current methods, manufacturing a flu vaccine — which, to my enormous fascination, most commonly involves secret chicken farms — takes six to eight months.
That long lag often means the virus circulating during flu season isn't the one the vaccine was designed to target. But the new mRNA vaccine works differently: Instead of using a weakened or dead virus to trigger an immune response, mRNA vaccines contain genetic instructions that train the immune system to fight influenza.
mRNA vaccines also take less time to manufacture, so they can be produced closer to flu season. In a clinical trial, older adults who received Moderna’s mRNA vaccine were 27% less likely to get the flu than those who received the standard vaccine.
- Vox
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