Re: At this time, what's the point?
Every research group that normally figures out which vaccine is best this year was working on Covid. Why would you expect a flu vaccine to be available?
Well, because it is. And it's lucrative to churn out millions of flu jabs. Also kind of interesting how it works. So rely on our seasonal variations and collect samples down under where it's autumn/winter. Analyse the results to find the circulating strains, and by summer, there's usually a pretty good candidate for the northern hemisphere. So start cooking that up ready for our winter season. And it works most of the time, which also means epidemiologists have a pretty good idea how the influenza virus spreads around the world. One of those neat medical advances that's meant hospitals don't need to keep winter wards on stand-by.
Downside I guess is having capacity to churn out vaccines for both flu and Covid given both have the highest impact at the same time, ie winter. I kind of wonder if we'll go back to bottles of vaccine vs single-use/pre-packaged jabs & if that could make production/distribution faster.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
