How a single flu shot could protect you for decades
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Iran, Lebanon, Israel, Gaza. With conflict unfolding in so many places, firsthand reporting has never mattered more. NPR Plus supporters power that work. They make it possible for our journalists to go where news is happening. And supporters get perks for NPR podcasts, things like bonus episodes, archive access, and more. You can sign up at plus.npr.org. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that anywhere from 24,000 to 81,000 people died from the flu during this past flu season. Hundreds of thousands more were hospitalized and millions were infected. And this is a moderate season. In the event of a whole flu pandemic, those numbers could be much higher.
There is more than 100 potential pandemic flu viruses that could start the pandemic.
That's Adolfo García Sastre, a viral immunologist at the ICANN School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. He's working on a vaccine that could not only protect people from a pandemic flu virus, but all flu viruses. No more annual flu shots. He calls it a universal flu vaccine.
This shot that we are working on will protect not only against seasonal influenza, not only of this year, not only against next year and next year and next year and this year, but also will prevent pandemic influenza from an animal reservoir.
A vaccine like this hasn't been possible before because the virus that causes the flu, influenza, mutates every year, evading the previous year's vaccine.
But he says... The virus cannot change completely. If not, we will not recognize it as influenza.
And Adolfo and his team are working on a vaccine that can target all versions of the influenza virus, past, present and future, if they can find the resources. Today on the show, the science behind a vaccine against all flus and what scientists need to make it a reality. I'm Regina Barber and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Okay, Adolfo, what about the flu virus impacts why we need a yearly vaccine?
Yeah, so that's because the virus changes every year. And when we are talking about human influenza, we're talking about three viruses right now. Okay.
What is the current state of flu vaccination in the U.S.?
And that's the reason why the vaccine has three components. So there is what they call the influenza A and influenza B. A comes also in two shapes right now in humans that are called H1 and H3. And H refers to one of the proteins of the virus, the spike of the virus. It is called hemagglutinin. And that's H1 will be hemagglutinin subtype 1. H3 will be hemagglutinin subtype 3. All these three variants are circulating in people. Some seasons, they are mainly H3s. Some seasons, they are mainly H1s. Some seasons, they are mainly B. But there is always H1s, H3s, and Bs causing infections in humans.
So flu A, which comes into H subtypes, and then Bs. Okay.
So we need three components, right? But each one of these viruses change every year. And they do so to avoid pre-existing immunity.
Right.
And the vaccine tries to cover the strains that are circulating. So we make the vaccine for whatever is going to be circulating this year. And the prediction comes from the surveillance that has been done for influenza to see what is circulating at any time in the year. And sometimes we miss it for at least one of the components. This year, for example, we miss it. For H3s, there was this newest strain that became quickly very prevalent, and this one was not very well covered by the H3 component of the vaccine. Still, it provides you some efficacy, but instead of having perhaps an efficacy of 70%, prevention from disease, then it goes down to 30% because it's mismatched.
Right. So all of this refers to current vaccine strategies, like what we do now. That's based on targeting parts of the viruses that change. But what you're working on is targeting regions that stay the same in the influenza virus in order to make this universal flu vaccine. one that we wouldn't need to get every year. Now, historically, there have been barriers to creating this kind of vaccine.
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