Day 93: A new approach to flu vaccines, if you go for that sort of thing

The city of Bellflower, California had this on its flier announcing the availability of flu shots.

I’ve never gotten a flu shot. And even if a pandemic loomed, I doubt I would. I’m not opposed to most vaccines, and certainly I support time-tested, life-saving childhood vaccination programs. But I think it’s a little strange how people can be heard polling each other in late fall, asking, “Have you gotten your flu shot?” Your flu shot. Like it’s an annual responsibility or an entitlement. 

Every once in a while — every other year, or maybe once a year — I get sick. I feel a little weak and dizzy, maybe my throat hurts, it’s hard to breathe and I cough a lot. And then it goes away. I rarely know where I am on the cold/flu boundary when it happens, but I’m usually glad that my body got a chance to fight something. 

I guess I think of it as my own personal immunity protocol: I hope anything truly sinister that comes along will be a cousin to something I’ve fought before. And then I win. 

That’s just my personal approach, and it might be bunk. But I can’t help noticing some overlap in my own rugged ideas and the findings in a paper that came out today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

Health workers worry about influenza because it (being a single-stranded RNA virus) can mutate very rapidly, which increases its chances of morphing into a form that works inside a new host. They’ve feared a bird flu pandemic for years, and now the swine flu has the world on alert. 

Communities and hospitals struggle to arrive at mass-vaccination plans that would save the maximum number of lives in a widespread emergency. Vaccine-induced resistence, however, often would require two injections about two weeks apart. That poses logistical challenges, and people could die during the drawn-out process. 

Grazia Gallia, of Novartis Vaccines in Siena, Italy, is lead author of the new study, which found that people who had been vaccinated against an older bird flu strain retained bodily memory of the immune response. Those people could develop resistence to a new bird flu strain with only a single booster.

The plan is simple: 

“A pre-pandemic vaccine could be stockpiled for distribution at a time of imminent threat to induce cross-protective responses while waiting for pandemic vaccine,” the authors write. “Proactive priming could be performed today to induce memory responses for a future event.”

The authors reported a series of conflicts of interest in the study, including that eight of the 18 co-authors work for Novartis Vaccines, and several have received funding from vaccine producers. 

The paper is here.