Bird flu vaccine faces hurdles without better data, critics say
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US scientists haven’t gotten a handle on how to effectively track bird flu, three months after a Texas dairy worker was diagnosed with the virus. That is impeding the ability to create a vaccine to protect against the spread among people.
Bird flu’s health risk to the general public remains low, according to US officials. But if the virus becomes more dangerous, it’s unclear we’ll have a shot that works, according to Kate Broderick, a vaccine developer at Maravai LifeSciences, who has helped develop shots against Ebola and Zika.
Ms Broderick said that scientists don’t have a clear picture of the viral strain that’s currently circulating and whether the virus is more widespread than what’s been reported already. It is “a complete guessing game,” Ms Broderick said.
Federal health officials are trying to avoid a repeat of 2009 when there was a dearth of vaccine doses to combat the H1N1 swine flu outbreak. They’re also leaning on lessons learned from covid on viral sequencing, which allows scientists to use evolving disease samples to identify new strains and update their shots.
The EU has secured up to 665,000 doses of CSL Seqirus’ vaccine that matches the current strain for 15 member states.
The four-year contract included an option to purchase as many as 40 million doses. Finland was the first country to offer the shots to poultry workers, even though no human detections have been reported.
However, many of those shots were developed from older strains and may not be as effective at attacking the current version of avian flu, should it start infecting people. Ms Broderick said:
Targeting a strain of the virus that spreads between people will likely require quickly developing a different shot, said Peter Hotez, a vaccine expert and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.
Moderna and Pfizer have been in discussions with the US government about developing mRNA-based bird flu vaccines. Such technology would be able to be updated more quickly than traditional vaccines, many of which are grown in chicken eggs.
- Bloomberg