A recent report from Barron’s details that vaccine developers Moderna and Pfizer are likely creating an avian flu vaccine.
The report comes as Moderna stock increased earlier this month, signaling discussions of vaccine developments.
The Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Assistant Secretary of Preparedness and Response, Dawn O’Connell, told the outlet that the agency is in the middle of “active conversations with both manufacturers, and the negotiations are ongoing.”
O’Connell added that HHS “had begun the process of converting 4.8 million doses of avian influenza vaccine from bulk product in the government’s stockpile to finished doses ready to be administered,” Barron’s noted.
Moderna shared that the federal government is considering “advancing our pandemic flu candidate.”
According to research published by the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, an experimental mRNA vaccine targeting avian influenza is “highly effective.”
Researchers created an mRNA vaccine against H5N1 for mice and ferrets, finding that it “elicits robust antibody and CD8+ T cell responses in mice.”
Animals that remained unvaccinated for the study died.
The researchers acknowledged, however, that it is “unclear how vaccine doses in mice relate to vaccine doses in humans.”
The research was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Professor of Microbiology at the Perelman School of Medicine Scott Hensley, PhD, said, “The mRNA technology allows us to be much more agile in developing vaccines; we can start creating a mRNA vaccine within hours of sequencing a new viral strain with pandemic potential,” adding, “During previous influenza pandemics, like the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, vaccines were difficult to manufacture and did not become available until after the initial pandemic waves subsided.”
Former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Robert Redfield warned that gain-of-function research into the bird flu virus may cause a “great pandemic.”
He emphasized that gain-of-function research “should not be done.”
“That’s the real threat, that’s the real biosecurity threat, that these university labs are doing these bio-experiments that are intentionally modifying viruses,” he explained. “Bird flu, I think, is going to be the cause of the next great pandemic.”