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[deleted] t1_j9u00w7 wrote

[deleted]

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Ch3mee t1_j9u2uoc wrote

But, this is good, even though the vaccine is different. Because a vaccine is already developed. It wouldn't be a significant change to include vaccination against this into current flu vaccinations. That, and we already have quite a lot of experience with flu vaccines. So, this saves a lot of development and approval time on deployment. That's awesome. Now, the current populations education level regarding vaccination is less awesome.

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sciolycaptain t1_j9u48fn wrote

Making influenza vaccines is something the world has experience and capacity to do (because we do it every year), however current techniques still have a bit of lag between identifying a novel strain and then development and mass manufacturing.

If we looking at the 2009 H1N1 outbreak, it took about 6 months to have a specific H1N1 vaccine approved and distributed after the first human cases.

With mRNA vaccines, which they are looking into for influenza, the turn around time may be significantly shorter.

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DiceMaster t1_j9u7jlq wrote

How long can flu vaccines last in cryo storage? Could it make sense to have tons of h5n1 vaccine stockpiled just in case?

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sciolycaptain t1_j9u8fp0 wrote

Influenza vaccines can't be frozen without having decreased efficacy. They have a narrow window of temps they can be stored in a refrigerator, and once room temperature, must be used within 72 hours.

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DiceMaster t1_j9uahwa wrote

"Cryo" may not have been the exact word I was looking for. How long do they last, sealed and in a fridge?

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boooooooooo_cowboys t1_j9uqop3 wrote

I don’t know that there is much solid data to address that question. Typically flu vaccines are tailored to whatever strains are circulating in a given season, so they’re just thrown away at the before the next flu season.

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aphilsphan t1_j9urj8k wrote

There will be solid data somewhere, and generally an expiry date on the label. The manufacturer would have done or sponsored shelf life stability tests.

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xanthraxoid t1_j9uyoii wrote

It's worth noting that these tests aren't completely comprehensive. Recall that the nominal shelf life of various Covid vaccines was extended a couple of times - the initial results were interpreted conservatively, but over time more evidence allowed a more confident prediction of a longer shelf life.

When it comes to a vaccine that's not expected to be useful more than ~6 months into the future (nobody's taking the flu jab in the spring, and next year they'll want the new one) there's not really much point in measuring how it lasts beyond that with any degree of rigour.

Providing the shelf life is expected to be good enough for "this year's flu season" (3 months?) they'll most likely just use that figure and move on to more valuable work.

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NotAnotherEmpire t1_j9u8ok4 wrote

Tons, no. We don't know what the antigens of a future pandemic strain would be.

The USA does try to keep an updated stockpile of H5N1 vaccine, at least enough for doctors, first responders and the armed forces.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28554058/

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DiceMaster t1_j9uazju wrote

> The USA does try to keep an updated stockpile of H5N1 vaccine, at least enough for doctors, first responders and the armed forces.

That's sensible. Do we know how effective the h5n1 vaccine is, given that bird flu is so rare in humans to begin with?

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NotAnotherEmpire t1_j9vtck8 wrote

We don't "know know" because the infections are so rare and the virus is so dangerous. This is not a virus where one would do human challenge tests.

We do know what a successful flu vaccine match looks like though, and in animal tests (like the one linked) it shows what we want to see.

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The_RealKeyserSoze t1_j9uak8y wrote

We don't really stockpile flu vaccines because influenza changes and so older versions would not be very helpful. Instead we stockpile the raw materials and production capabilities for the vaccines. The traditional flu vaccine is made using chicken eggs infected with the virus so many countries have their own emergency supplies of chickens/eggs for this purpose.

Now that we also havecell based flu vaccines that don't require chicken eggs as well as future mRNA based flu vaccines that can be rapidly mass produced there will likely be a variety of of options for stockpiling/emergency preparation.

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xanthraxoid t1_j9uyz4e wrote

Emergency Chicken Stockpile is a combination of concepts I didn't expect to encounter today...

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Whiterabbit-- t1_j9uhkgw wrote

why is mrna shorter time to market?

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BlueOmega169 t1_j9ulafx wrote

The development pipeline is substantially shorter, if you can produce an mRNA vaccine you can theoretically produce any mRNA vaccine. Once you have the genetic sequence of the strain you're interested in, preparing one mRNA transcript is (more or less) the same as preparing any other. The same is not true for protein expression or live attenuated virus preparation. Preparing the vaccine at scale faster means getting to testing sooner, and testing sooner means results sooner.

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sciolycaptain t1_j9uoxo9 wrote

The current influenza vaccines are made by incubating the virus in fertilized chicken eggs. That step takes time. and hundreds of millions of eggs.

With mRNA vaccines, you can just throw templates, nucleotides, and enzymes into a container and get more mRNA for the vaccine (extremely oversimplified)

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LonelyGnomes t1_j9vb0nr wrote

I feel like that’s exactly how I’ve done PCR every time (plus some buffer and magnesium). It’s kinda magic.

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gwaydms t1_j9ulttt wrote

>2009 H1N1 outbreak

I caught that before the vaccine came out. It made me pretty sick (fever, chills, headache, dry cough). My symptoms were typical for that strain. And it was summer, not exactly prime flu season.

In those early days, brain and/or lung involvement was causing severe and even fatal disease and I didn't have that. I stayed in bed and just rode it out.

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ThellraAK t1_j9uw5u9 wrote

Isn't most of the delays in it regulatory stuff?

There were people DIYing COVID-19 vaccines as early as July 2020

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Chemputer t1_j9xmjgs wrote

Pretty much. It's one thing if you are confident enough in your own work to dose yourself, but you definitely want to know the efficacy and safety profile before you dose millions of people with it, so we do kinda need the regulatory stuff, even in a pandemic we still had essentially the bare necessities of it. I'm convinced that it was slower than it could've been at "bare necessity" speed because they were also proving the safety and efficacy of mRNA vaccines for the first time, so in the future we wouldn't need to go as slow.

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Ch3mee t1_j9uj9nh wrote

I was responding to a post saying there is already an H5N1 vaccine developed. I don't know if that's true, but its not that unbelievable it could be. My point is that if the H5N1 vaccine is already developed, then that significantly shortens the timeline. The lag just becomes the manufacturing ramp, but that can be retooled fairly quickly, and supplies can start moving almost immediately. The lag will be from the first people to get a dose to supply for the eventual demand. That can be slow, but with some planning and foresight, batches of vaccines can be deployed following patterns of outbreak. Basically, instead of months, vaccines could start hitting problem areas in days if there is already some inventory or weeks as production starts on an approved formulation.

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IslandDoggo t1_j9ur288 wrote

Part of what made covid a problem was it being novel. H5N1 means a lot of awful things for us, potentially. But it is not novel. We know this enemy.

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PhoenixReborn t1_j9vbscq wrote

Flu strains mutate rapidly. That's why they're updated and administered every year. We have a vaccine, but it hasn't been designed for the current sequence. The typical turnaround time for the annual flu vaccine is six months.

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ZipTheZipper t1_j9u6bi5 wrote

> Now, the current populations education level regarding vaccination is less awesome.

Covid's case fatality rate has leveled off to roughly 1%. SARS was estimated at 10%, and MERS was 34%. This strain of H5N1 is above 50% right now. If it becomes easily transmissible between humans, either the antivaxxers change their minds fairly quickly or the only people left will be ones who believed in vaccination.

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ChickpeaPredator t1_j9u9wbq wrote

>If it becomes easily transmissible between humans, either the antivaxxers change their minds fairly quickly or the only people left will be ones who believed in vaccination.

Evolution in action, people: move with the times or remove yourself from the gene pool. It's incredibly sad, and I wish it weren't like this, but if you can't be persuaded with logic to do something for your own safety and the safety of others well... there's a point at which we can't do any more for you, and we have to let nature take its course.

Edit: in case it wasn't obvious, my comment above is in support of vaccination.

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Beat_the_Deadites t1_j9uflqo wrote

Evolution also in action - different strategies for responding to evolutionary pressure.

Group A: moves cautiously and with extensive forethought. Acts slowly but with higher success rate and longevity. Reproduces below replacement level.

Group B: Shotgun approach, devil-may-care attitude. Pops out kids like a mushroom releasing spores. Overwhelms evolutionary pressure by sheer volume. Some offspring migrate over to Group A, keeping the two groups in some sort of balance, if not harmony.

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ChickpeaPredator t1_j9v0qcy wrote

The group B approach is exclusively used by organisms with low offspring investment. As the amount of investment goes down, the quantity of offspring increases.

We aren't like that - it takes a humongous amount of resources to raise a functional human. So we either slip backwards from our humanity and become simpler organisms with less offspring investment required, or we have to expand infinitely to gather enough resources. The latter is impossible, there's always going to be some limit to expansion, so we would be left with the former; backsliding.

You're right in that option B is a viable evolutionary strategy, but it's not a world in which I want to live. I'd rather be a person amongst peers than a king amongst idiots.

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Ch3mee t1_j9uki9u wrote

I mean, in the simplest scenario, Group B wins. Simply because group A is self selecting themselves out by reproducing below replacement level. I mean, the whole name of the game is ability to reproduce successfully. If Group B is popping out kids like a mushroom releasing spores, then they're brute forcing the reproduction game.

Of course, nothing is that simple. If the devil-may-care attitude ends up with the group not getting a vaccine during a very deadly pandemic, they could be eliminated almost entirely.

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Beat_the_Deadites t1_j9un7qy wrote

Sure, my example is way over-simplified, and group B will always have a higher mortality rate, which could be disastrous for them in a pandemic with a high death rate. But the survivors of that pandemic are going to think themselves extra special and try to repopulate the globe again.

Using the tools provided by Group A, of course.

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Yancy_Farnesworth t1_j9ul5fz wrote

> Because a vaccine is already developed.

People really don't understand how much effort is expended annually to update the vaccine for flu season. The flu virus mutates really easily unlike COVID. It's why we have an annual flu shot. If someone is infected with multiple flu variants, the variants literally start swapping parts creating essentially a new strain. We've been developing new flu vaccines every year for decades. It's not just a few tweaks every year, it's literally a new vaccine every year.

The WHO is responsible for tracking flu strains going around the world and creating the vaccine for that year. This requires a lot of tracking of flu cases world-wide and analyzing the strains going around and creating a vaccine that targets the strains going around. And there are a lot of strains circulating, it's literally impossible to vaccinate against all of them.

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Ch3mee t1_j9usoac wrote

You lost me at the "unlike Covid" where we have been through like 6 major variants, with a few dozen minor variants, inside 2 years time.

Usually, a flu vaccine isn't one strain. The vaccine is a combination of several strains that researchers believe will be predominate that year. But, even subvariants of strains don't require absolutely new development of vaccine. It depends on the anti-gen of the strain. Amd this mostly deals with flu A. Flu B is a bit different. Vaccines will have B and a few strains of A in a yearly shot.

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Yancy_Farnesworth t1_j9uwkrk wrote

> where we have been through like 6 major variants, with a few dozen minor variants, inside 2 years time.

That's the point? It's a relative comparison between the flu virus and the COVID virus, not a claim that COVID doesn't mutate. We would be in deep trouble if COVID had the same potential to mutate that the flu virus does. We're lucky that the flu virus doesn't have the same level of immune evasion/suppression that a lot of coronaviruses have.

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swiftb3 t1_j9uuhl4 wrote

> The flu vaccine only protects against specific strains of the flu virus that are expected to be around in the upcoming flu season.

Directly, though you do get some level of partial immunity to other similar strains of flu. Whether there's enough overlap with the H5N1 for any partial recognition, I don't know. I'm sure not enough to be significant.

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velawesomeraptors t1_j9viibb wrote

Hm, speaking as an ornithologist who works directly with wild birds, do you know how difficult it is to obtain a vaccine? My boss keeps bringing up bird flu in staff meetings and I feel like a vaccine would at least make her less worried.

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Intern11 t1_j9vb4jp wrote

That vaccine will only protect you from the current variant of the bird flu which only passes from birds to animals. If the virus mutates and transforms into one that can pass from person to person we would need to engineer a whole new vaccine which wouldn’t be worked on until we found the dominant strain of the new pandemic.

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nirad t1_j9vfteg wrote

It seems like we should probably be stockpiling that, even if it ends up going to waste. And we should be inoculating people in the developing world who work with birds.

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zeocca t1_j9vhrmw wrote

>This vaccine is not part of the routine flu shot schedule and is usually only recommended for people who work with birds or people who are traveling to areas where the virus is known to be present.

Where have you read this? We have a vaccine in development, but no responders nor poultry workers are being vaccinated for this specific strain. Is this in a specific country? Is it attuned to this specific strain? I know of an older one developed by Astrazenaca, but it is only for those 18 or younger. Nothing for the current situation is in use that I am aware of.

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