$500 million universal flu vaccine: Moonshot-like project proposes to use 50-year old technology that likely won’t work

Dubbed Generation Gold Standard, the project is aimed at creating a flu shot that doesn’t have to be updated every year to match the latest strains of the virus. The project also aims to produce a vaccine that could protect people against other respiratory viruses that could cause a pandemic, such as bird flu and coronaviruses.

[T]he project plans to use an approach that would involve injecting people with a whole flu virus that has been killed with a chemical to render it harmless but is still capable of stimulating the immune system. Most vaccine experts consider the whole killed virus approach to be antiquated.

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“We’re going back to technology that was used 40, 50 years ago or more. …  It’s a very old technology,” says [Dr. Gregory Poland, a vaccine expert who leads the Atria Academy of Science and Medicine in New York.] “This is what influenza vaccines in the 40s, 50s and 60s looked like.”

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