A universal flu vaccine would be pretty wild honestly, but how would it work? Doesn't it change often enough that it can't be 'fixed'?
I'm so mad that this anti-vaccine bullshit is happening, because i'm starting to fear that new vaccines will be less impactful in certain areas do to reduced herd immunity
All I'm pretty sure of is that flue mutates wicked fast so the flue one year from now will be too different from the pervious one to vaccine out.
Unless I'm thinking of something different.
Yeah that's how it works as far as I know, which is why it's such a bitch to vaccinate
I'm wondering if we make a universal vaccine, what if it mutated in such a way that the vaccine stopped working due to reduced herd immunity? That would really suck.
its not only that, there's multiple strains of the flu during each "flu season". there could be one strain south east US, and a completely different one up north.
I'm pretty confused to how this works, because if i remember my second year immunology correctly, viruses have rapidly changing antigens (proteins on the exteroir of the viral particle) that makes it difficult for the body to recognise it and produce antibodies for defence. Maybe this particular vaccine exploits another aspect of the influenza virus, like replication or host cell entry?
I Am Not A Biologist but the antigens on influenza A (hemagglutinin and neuraminidase) serve a functional purpose for the virus so even though they may mutate rapidly, not all mutations are tolerated as some may lead to nonfunctional proteins. It may be possible to develop a vaccine that targets the conserved regions of the proteins, but the enormous variability of these proteins (in no small part complicated by variable glycosylation patterns, even in the absence of amino acid substitutions) makes that a pretty tough challenge.
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