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Comment by mikeyouse | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, it's very difficult to predict which are going to be the dominant strains so they take a best guess, include the several candidates that they expect to be most virulent that season and ship that as the "flu vaccine" that season.

The hope is that with a much faster time from approval -> production, in theory we could reassess in October / December / February and vaccinate against the most virulent strains that are actually showing up in populations. There are reports that Moderna had a vaccine developed in two days once they received the sequence from researchers. If they or similar companies received "platform" approval to ship new vaccines with abbreviated testing, it could dramatically change how we vaccinate for the flu.

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Specifically we guess based on the other hemisphere since flu is mostly a winter illness -- People report "flu" year round, but the deadly Influenza virus is most "flu" in winter, whereas in summer most "flu" was just a bad cold, in medicine the term is ILI (Influenza Like Illness). This gives us several months between the worst of their Influenza cases on the far side of the world and us needing to inject our vulnerable populations with a vaccine.

This means the relatively mild flu load in Australia and especially New Zealand actually hurt this year's Northern Hemisphere guess - they were isolating because of COVID-19 and so they had far fewer than usual cases on which to base guesses.

That would be an amazing world. What do regulators think of the "platform approval" concept, though? I can't imagine that this kind of approval currently exists under most governments' regulatory regimes for vaccines.

I think over the next 10 years governments, scientists, and businesses are going to be asking themselves how they can be prepared for the next pandemic. This will make governments more likely to approve a fast track for the mRNA platform, and popular support more likely to sway in favor of this.

If we had generic facilities that could produce any mRNA vaccines, and an mRNA vaccine approval process that takes 30 days then we could have had covid vaccines ready to go before March 2020, and those whole story looks very different.

My understanding is that this, or something like it, is already done for flu vaccines; that's exactly how they're able to release updated versions each year.

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