What Are The Benefits Of Flu Vaccination
There are many reasons to get an influenza vaccine each year. Below is a summary of the benefits of flu vaccination and selected scientific studies that support these benefits.
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Flu vaccination can keep you from getting sick with flu.
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Flu vaccination can reduce the risk of flu-associated hospitalization for children, working-age adults, and older adults.
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Flu vaccination is an important preventive tool for people with chronic health conditions.
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Flu vaccination has been associated with lower rates of some cardiac events among people with heart disease, especially among those who had had a cardiac event in the past year.
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Flu vaccination can reduce worsening and hospitalization for flu-related chronic lung disease, such as in persons with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
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Flu vaccination also has been shown in separate studies to be associated with reduced hospitalizations among people with diabetes and chronic lung disease.
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Flu vaccination helps protect women during and after pregnancy.
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Flu vaccines can be lifesaving in children.
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Flu vaccination has been shown in several studies to reduce the severity of illness in people who get vaccinated but still get sick.
The study finding links to support these findings can be found here:
People At High Risk Of Complications From The Flu
- people with health conditions, such as:
- cancer and other immune compromising conditions
- diabetes
- kidney disease
- neurological or neurodevelopmental conditions
- children up to 18 years of age undergoing treatment for long periods with acetylsalicylic acid
Preparing The Country For The Swine Flu Vaccine
Beginning with the July 9 Flu Summit, federal health officials stepped up work with state and local officials to lay the groundwork for a massive immunization effort. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has pledged $7.5 billion in preparedness funds and $350 million in direct grants to states and territories.
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When Should I Get Vaccinated
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You should get a flu vaccine before flu viruses begins spreading in your community, since it takes about two weeks after vaccination for antibodies to develop in the body and provide protection against flu. Make plans to get vaccinated early in fall, before flu season begins. CDC recommends that people get a flu vaccine by the end of October. However, getting vaccinated early is likely to be associated with reduced protection against flu infection later in the flu season, particularly among older adults. Vaccination should continue to be offered throughout the flu season, even into January or later. Children who need two doses of vaccine to be protected should start the vaccination process sooner, because the two doses must be given at least four weeks apart.
The Flu Vaccine Is Safe
To ensure that the flu vaccine is safe, effective, and of high quality, the FDA prepares and provides reagents to manufacturers that they need to make their vaccine and to verify its identity and potency. The FDA also inspects manufacturing facilities regularly and evaluates each manufacturers vaccine annually before it can be approved.
The FDAs oversight doesnt end there. After manufacturers have distributed their vaccines for use by the public, the FDA and CDC work together to routinely evaluate reports of adverse events following vaccination submitted by vaccine manufacturers, health care providers and vaccine recipients to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System .
Additional efforts are in place to monitor vaccine safety. The FDA partners with private organizations that collect health care data and other federal agencies to further evaluate the safety and effectiveness of the influenza vaccines and other vaccines that the FDA has approved or authorized for emergency use.
The Biologics Effectiveness and Safety Initiative is one of the programs the FDA utilizes to assess vaccine safety and effectiveness in real-world conditions, reflecting patient care and the real-world use of the influenza vaccine and other vaccines in the U.S. In addition, the CDC maintains the Vaccine Safety Datalink program, which evaluates the vaccines safety similar to the BEST Initiative. VSD receives its data from nine integrated health care organizations in the U.S.
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How Long Does It Take To Make Vaccines
by Matt Shipman, North Carolina State University
In this post, we focus on how long it takes to develop and manufacture vaccinesparticularly those designed to protect against COVID-19.
To address those questions, we spoke with Jennifer Pancorbo, director of industry programs and research at NC State’s Biomanufacturing Training and Education Center. Pancorbo is an expert in vaccinemanufacturing, with particular expertise in viral vector vaccine development and production processes.
This post is part of a series of Q& As in which NC State experts address questions about the vaccines on issues ranging from safety to manufacturing to how the vaccines will be distributed.
The Abstract: How long does it take to make vaccines?
Jennifer Pancorbo: There are two ways to interpret this question. Do you mean actually manufacturing a vaccine that is already created? Or do you mean designing a new vaccine?
Developing a new vaccine from scratch takes considerable time. It depends a lot on how much information is available about the disease itself, how the disease infects people and spreads, and so on. But it traditionally has taken 5-10 years to get a new vaccine. That makes it truly amazing that we already have one authorized vaccine for COVID-19, and are evaluating stage 3 clinical trial data on others. It speaks volumes about the efforts put into pandemic preparedness and response.
TA: What types of vaccines are the most promising COVID-19 vaccine candidates?
Explore further
Other Methods Of Manufacture
Methods of vaccine generation that bypass the need for eggs include the construction of influenza virus-like particles . VLP resemble viruses, but there is no need for inactivation, as they do not include viral coding elements, but merely present antigens in a similar manner to a virion. Some methods of producing VLP include cultures of Spodoptera frugiperdaSf9 insect cells and plant-based vaccine production . There is evidence that some VLPs elicit antibodies that recognize a broader panel of antigenically distinct viral isolates compared to other vaccines in the hemagglutination-inhibition assay .
A gene-based DNA vaccine, used to prime the immune system after boosting with an inactivated H5N1 vaccine, underwent clinical trials in 2011.
On November 20, 2012, Novartis received FDA approval for the first cell-culture vaccine. In 2013, the recombinant influenza vaccine, Flublok, was approved for use in the United States.
On September 17, 2020, the Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use of the European Medicines Agency adopted a positive opinion, recommending the granting of a marketing authorization for Supemtek, a quadrivalent influenza vaccine . The applicant for this medicinal product is Sanofi Pasteur. Supemtek was approved for medical use in the European Union in November 2020.
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When The Swine Flu Virus Swept The World In 2009 Scientists Were In A Similar Rush Like Today To Develop A Vaccine But In A Little Over Five Months The First Doses Of The Swine Flu Vaccine Were Made Available To The Public And The Pandemic Ended In August 2010
Written by Longjam Dineshwori | Updated : July 21, 2020 2:02 PM IST
Scientists around the world are in a race against time to develop a vaccine to protect people against the . More than 150 vaccine candidates are being developed across the globe, with some countries claiming to launch a potential shot with this year. Russia is ready to start phase 3 trials of one of its promising COVID-19 vaccines from August 3. But the country’s Health Minister Mikhail Murashko has indicated that the vaccine could be made available to the general public before it clears the final trial. Oxford University‘s highly-touted COVID-19 vaccine, called AZD1222, is already in large-scale Phase III human trials and it is expected to be released in September. India has also started clinical trials of its first indigenous COVID-19 vaccine ‘Covaxin‘ across the country. The vaccine developed by Bharat Biotech is planned for launch in August. It’s been more than seven months now since the coronavirus outbreak started in China. Why it is taking so long to develop a vaccine against the virus? In 2009, when swine flu hit the world, scientists were able to come up with a vaccine in a little over five months.
Flu Vaccine Could Cut Covid Risk
People in Santiago are vaccinated against influenza.Credit: Ivan Alvarado/Reuters/Alamy
Influenza vaccines have a surprising health benefit: they might also prevent COVID-19, particularly in its most severe forms.
A study of more than 30,000 health-care workers in Qatar found that those who got a flu jab were nearly 90% less likely to develop severe COVID-19 over the next few months, compared with those who hadnt been recently vaccinated against flu.
The study, which was conducted in late 2020, before the roll-out of COVID-19 vaccines, is in line with previous work suggesting that ramping up the immune system using influenza vaccines and other jabs could help the body to fend off the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2.
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Administer Vaccine Now Or Later
If there seems to be a huge increase in pandemic flu cases, officials will be tempted to trigger vaccine delivery before safety and efficacy studies are completed.
Would that be safe? The pandemic swine flu bug is a type A H1N1 virus. One of the seasonal flu bugs is a type A H1N1 flu bug. Seasonal vaccine doesn’t protect against the new swine flu bug. But there’s a long history of safety and efficacy for flu vaccines made of H1N1 antigens, notes flu expert John Treanor, MD, chief of infectious diseases at the University of Rochester, New York.
“You might be sitting at the end of August faced with the decision to do this,” Treanor tells WebMD. “If we wait, we can’t do vaccination until November. If the pandemic flu follows the seasonal-flu pattern with the bulk of activity in January through March, fine. But if we see this second wave coming in September, we might be faced with the decision to do vaccinations without clinical data.”
An HHS advisory committee on July 17 strongly recommended that Sebelius give the green light to vaccine production by Aug. 15 — before safety and dosing tests are finished. That would mean 60 to 80 million vaccine doses could be ready by Sept. 15.
How fast pandemic flu vaccine gets to people depends on the decision whether to give the vaccine in the traditional way or with something called an adjuvant.
Vaccinating all Americans would be an effort of historic proportions.
Is The Flu Vaccine Safe
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The flu vaccine is safe for most people and is recommended for everyone ages 6 months and older. People who should not receive flu vaccines are those who have had a severe allergic reaction to a flu or other vaccine in the past and those who have had a condition called Guillan-Barre syndrome.
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If you have questions about your specific medical conditions, call your doctor to ask about if its safe for you to get a flu vaccine.
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Who Will Want The Swine Flu Vaccine
A decision will be made whether to deploy pandemic swine flu vaccine for some or all U.S. residents. If that happens, the CDC will begin an intensive campaign to persuade people at high risk of flu complications to get vaccinated. The program will have to address issues of vaccine safety in a straightforward manner. “Public trust is crucial we risk it at our peril. If we risk public trust with bad vaccination decisions, it will take us years to recover,” Pavia warns.
“You are going to have less data than you want to make a decision on the go or no-go, but you are going to have to make it on the best available data at the time,” says Gellin. “The middle of September is where all this stuff theoretically converges. That is the point where at least we think we will have preliminary data to see how the vaccine is performing and say where are we with this epidemic and what is the situation.”
Measles Mumps And Rubella
Measles, Mumps, and Rubella are viral infections that have each caused widespread, deadly disease outbreaks. Throughout the 1960s, individual vaccines were developed for each of them, but a decade later, they were combined into one.
Measles was the first of the three to receive its own vaccine in 1963, followed by mumps in 1967, and rubella in 1969. Two years later, in 1971, Maurice Hilleman of the Merck Institute of Therapeutic Research developed a combined vaccination that would provide immunity for all three viruses.
Hilleman was credited with creating the first measles and mumps vaccine, and began researching ways to incorporate a system of immunity for each virus. Using his previous research and a rubella vaccine developed by Stanley Plotkin in 1969, he created the first successful MMR vaccine in just two years.
According to the CDC, “One dose of MMR vaccine is 93% effective against measles, 78% effective against mumps, and 97% effective against rubella.”
“Two doses of MMR vaccine are 97% effective against measles and 88% effective against mumps.”
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A Brief History Of The Flu Vaccine
Every year, three to five million people catch the seasonal flu, according to the World Health Organization , and between 290,000 and 650,000 people die from it worldwide. Still, thanks to the flu vaccine, this is only a fraction of how many people it used to kill. During the last major flu pandemic of 1918-1919, it killed between 50 and 100 million people around the world.
For a long time, scientists had thought that the flu was caused by a bacteria called Haemophilus influenzae, but after the 1918-19 pandemic, they started to suspect it was caused by a virus instead. However, it wouldnt be until the 1930s that they would confirm that. In 1933, three scientists isolated the Influenza A virus in ferrets one of the three types of flu and in 1936, it was discovered that the virus could be grown inside embryonated chicken eggs, a key step towards making a vaccine.
Just two years later, in 1938, Jonas Salk and Thomas Francis developed the first vaccine using fertilized chicken eggs and an inactivated strain of the Influenza A virus.
This new vaccine was first used to help protect soldiers fighting in World War II it wouldnt be approved for civilians until 1946. According to a 1944 study of the new vaccine, it helped reduce illness that was accompanied by a temperature above 99 degrees Fahrenheit.
Know your flu risk. Check out the Flu Tracker on The Weather Channel App.
How Long Does A Flu Shot Last
Given the potential complications of the flu and that some people are at increased risk for them, you may wonder just how long the flu shot lasts and if it will offer you the complete protection that you seek. The effects of the vaccine generally only last through one flu season, which is about six months long. That’s part of the reason you need one every year.
Starting two weeks after you get a flu shot, you should be protected from certain influenza viruses for the remainder of that flu season. Given the delay, properly timing your flu shot is important.
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A Needle In A Haystack
The challenge starts with the virus itself.
An expert shape-shifter, the flu is constantly changing mutating as it replicates itself in ways that allow its strains to get past our body’s immune defenses even if we’ve had the flu before, or if we roll up our sleeves for the shot each fall.
The result? It’s a bit of a war between us and the virus, says David Wentworth, director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Influenza in the U.S., which is run out of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
This battle plays out not only within the bodies of people who come down with the flu’s signature fever, chills and muscle aches, but also in laboratories around the world, where researchers must work quickly to analyze how the flu virus is changing in order to predict what it might do next.
The worldwide system of surveillance starts when specimens from sick patients are sent to the lab for testing. Of those, about 7,000 end up at the laboratory run by microbiologist John Barnes, who leads the CDC’s influenza genomics team.
“We’re always busy, and we’re always getting new viruses to work on, Barnes says. He and his team perform year-round genetic sequencing to determine how flu viruses are behaving, both in terms of which strains are infecting people and other characteristics, like whether a specimen shows signs of resistance to the antiviral drugs that can treat the flu.
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Why We Need New Flu Vaccines Every Year
There are several reasons a new flu vaccine must be made each year.
Flu viruses can change from year to year, so the vaccine is updated to protect against new virus strains that are expected to circulate in the U.S. The vaccine needs to include influenza virus strains that most closely match those in circulation for the influenza season. In addition, the protection provided by the flu vaccine a person received in the previous year will diminish over time and may be too low to prevent influenza disease into next years flu season.
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