Researchers claim that a new all-encompassing influenza vaccine could “pretty much eliminate influenza.” But the flu vaccine has been around since 1930, with large-scale availability in the United States starting in 1945, and we still see influenza infections.
If a vaccine could eliminate the flu, wouldn’t it be gone by now? The culling policy for bird flu mitigation raises a similar question. If it worked, wouldn’t we see bird flu disappear? There’s nothing like continuing to push a failed strategy when it comes to virology.
“We’re hoping to make vaccines that last for decades, instead of just every year,” said Eric Weaver, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln virologist.
it could cut off flu strains from evolving and jumping from species to species.
“If we can eliminate that reservoir and protect humans, there’s a real good possibility that we could pretty much eliminate influenza. It’s a crazy thing to say, but it’s possible that influenza could be eradicated in some cases,” Weaver said.
Vaccine For All Influenza A strains Developed In Nebraska
The mainstream media has admitted that almost a century of influenza vaccination has not eradicated it, but it has “lessened the symptoms.” That means it doesn’t prevent you from getting sick; it just makes the sickness more tolerable, as if there’s somehow a scientifically acceptable method of testing that.
According to a report by KETV7 Omaha, an ABC News affiliate, Weaver is taking a different approach to the traditional flu vaccines by using computer data to actually study how viruses evolve. “We look at how they’re evolving, we’re able to recreate them so that we can recombine those epitopes together so that we can make vaccines that will recognize all the different strains that circulated and have evolved over the last century,” Weaver said.
What they discovered after tests in mice, ferrets, pigs, and cattle shocked even them. While the researchers didn’t say how long the animals were “protected” from the flu, they did say that pigs were supposedly “protected” for “a long time.”
“The biggest discoveries in this vaccine approach was that the vaccine immune response that we create protects against a wide range of diverse influenza strains,” Weaver said. “So the vaccine technology, these concepts translate across these different animal species. So the likelihood that it’ll translate to humans is very high,” Weaver said.
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