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Your link says that flu shot coverage is 51.8% for all people over 6 months of age. The 64% number is for children. Flu vaccine effectiveness is not great beca
by khuey 6y ago
Your link says that flu shot coverage is 51.8% for all people over 6 months of age. The 64% number is for children.
Flu vaccine effectiveness is not great because they have to "guess" which variants of the flu will be most prevalent months ahead of time due to the manufacturing lead times. A lot of experts are optimistic than the mRNA vaccine technology will lead to more effective flu shots.
- petertodd 6y agoThanks! Fixed. > A lot of experts are optimistic than the mRNA vaccine technology will lead to more effective flu shots. We will see. Influenza is unusual in its ability to evolve new variants that resist existing antibodies. It's also not clear that we even can give people repeated mRNA vaccine shots year after year. People quite often develop antibodies to glycol, which makes up the nanospheres used to get the mRNA into cells. Repeated shots may lead to severe side effects, and/or the nanospheres being destroyed before the mRNA can be delivered, rendering the vaccines ineffective. Incidentally, this is also a problem with the new adenovirus technology used in the Astra Zeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines: your immune system develops antibodies to the carrier virus as well as the target proteins. Subsequent shots with the same adenovirus can be destroyed prior to being able to get into cells and express the desired protein; there isn't an infinite supply of suitable adenovirus strains. The Sputnik V vaccine actually uses a different adenovirus for the first and second shots for this reason.
- selimthegrim 6y agoI think this was only a problem with the HIV adenovirus vaccines.