In truth, we’re never fully ready for the flu. We know it’s coming, like the first fall leaf, and yet three times in the past century—in 1918, 1957, and 1968—it has flattened us, killing a million or more each time.
Our primary weapon against the virus, the flu vaccine, is woefully inadequate. Over the last decade and a half in the United States, flu vaccines have prevented illness only forty per cent of the time; in particularly bad years, when vaccines were less fine-tuned to the strains that were circulating, they were only ten-per-cent protective.
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In 2019, scientists at the Vaccine Research Center reported that they’d tested a mosaic flu vaccine on mice; each nanoparticle of the vaccine featured the heads of up to eight different flu strains.
It successfully teed up the production of antibodies capable of neutralizing a range of flu viruses that had appeared between 1918 and 2009.
This year, the same group reported a mosaic vaccine that could also protect people against avian flu variants that are especially dangerous to humans. A version of the vaccine has entered clinical trials.
