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The problem with the flu vaccine, just like the covid vaccine, is that it just doesn’t work very well. I’m confident that a sterilizing flu vaccine that worked
by User23 4y ago
The problem with the flu vaccine, just like the covid vaccine, is that it just doesn’t work very well. I’m confident that a sterilizing flu vaccine that worked as well as MMR, Tdap, polio, chickenpox, and various others would have considerably higher uptake than the semi-effective mostly palliative shots on the market today.
- vidarh 4y agoThe biggest problem with the flu vaccine is that there is no "the" flu vaccine. Each year there are attempts at predicting the prevalent strains that year and producing a multivalent vaccine targeting the most likely strains. Some years the prediction is spot on, some it misses badly. That is exactly what this attempt at a very broad coverage is attempting to change. The second problem is that this process makes it hard to build up stockpiles to actually provide vaccines to everyone, and so there's little incentive for any broad pushes to increase update outside of specific groups of people. If this attempt succeeds at getting coverage for a vaccine that can stay the same for longer periods, then expect to see attempts to distribute it more broadly and maybe even attempts to eradicate some of the strains.