January 26, 2018-
Every winter local news stations report about how one person died of the flu in your community and advocate to get the flu vaccine, but how effect are these flu vaccines? With hundreds of different strains of the flu virus how effective can a vaccine that fights just a handful? Yet every year around this time we are bombarded with advertisements and news stories about the deadly flu virus. As the article states, there are two different types of influenza A and B and this "Universal" vaccine only covers Influenza A of which they used only four common strains. The sell is that this vaccine is more effective than the current flu vaccines as they say work only 30% of the time, this vaccine is around 95% effective and you only need to take once or twice in your lifetime. So far this study has been used in mice and they plan on testing on ferrets next, so expecting FDA approval soon on this doesn't sound likely at this point. For me, I never had a flu vaccine and even when this one comes around I doubt I'll get one. I guess I've been lucky with not getting the flu.
-tbg1972-
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02725-4
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/universal-flu-vaccine-works-223043585.html