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by usrusr 1980 days ago
How are the flu vaccines doing this? Nature forces them to have an update cycle reminiscent of the fashion industry.
2 comments

The have to go through an approval process on every update but AFAICR only with a study including 300 adults, so substantially less then the tens of thousands that were included in the Biontec/Moderna trails.
Thanks. So they only test for lack of side effects, not for effectivity (outside of leech dish experiments), because with just 300 it would take decades to see a meaningful delta? (unless they do challenge tests?)
You think the mRNA vaccines with minimal changes be treated similarly? e.g one years flu cocktail, vs the next?
That's talking about selection for production, not about development. How is development not part of three scope at all? Are they only selecting amongst a pre-developed library? Do they have a reusable process that goes from strain to vaccine and "just works"? The latter would be very similar to a liberal approach like "we got delivery mechanism for mRNA blueprint of spike protein X approved, we can use the same approval for spike protein Y".
Here are some links that provide more information on how we make and regulate the flu vaccine.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/prevent/how-fluvaccine-made.htm

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4947948/#irv123...