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Comment by UncleOxidant | Hacker News Reader

> 2) lack of a mass produced vaccine

But this would be a flu vaccine. We've been making flu vaccines for a long time now. Why couldn't they just put H5N1 in next fall's flu vaccine?

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Pandemic flu doesn't have to be seasonal and we don't produce enough to actually vaccinate everyone who would want it, and even in a pandemic situation it would be a challenge to ramp up production.

"Should an outbreak of pandemic influenza occur today, the doses available for global populations within this time frame would be well short of the need, given the state of preparedness and the level of existing capacity. Our estimate is that in a “best-case” scenario, only 1.2 billion courses (2.4 billion doses) could be produced from current capacity within six months, and current stockpiles are limited."

https://www.path.org/resources/influenza-vaccine-strategies-...

We've had MERS and swine flu and C19 since that was published (2007), I imagine capacity may have improved since. And ultimately (cynically) that's just a function of the fact that maintaining a stockpile (or the capacity to quickly produce a world's supply) is not a goal of any individual country, anyone living in a country that is 1. Rich or 2. Houses pharma companies or their manufacturing facilities will probably be covered.

This report does say that things have improved since then:

https://api.healthsecuritynet.org/get/file/9789241515634-eng...

It's complicated, first there is not just one H5N1 virus, there is a family of them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H5N1_vaccine

The constant evolution of new strains is the norm for seasonal flus though, for which we update vaccines in a matter of months (without any emergency use authorisation to cut through red tape)

If this is indeed human to human transmission, humankind will look very different next fall.

If we look at historic flu trends we're going to be getting to the end of this year's flu season in the northern hemisphere in the next month or so. Usually starts ramping up in November (this last year it was a bit earlier) and goes through February, sometimes into March, but much less in Spring, Summer.

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