Moderna, the maker of the second COVID-19 vaccine that is expected to be approved for emergency use in the United States, is now looking to create a dual vaccine against flu and the new virus, the company’s chief executive said recently.
Moderna’s CEO Stephane Bancel said on Tuesday that this jab may be ready for use in a few years, although it is subject to regulatory approval by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA), not emergency use, what the existing coronavirus vaccine was like, he said during the Wall Street Journal Health Forum.
“Today the vaccines we have for seasonal flu are good in a great year and very bad in a bad year, in terms of effectiveness,” he said during the forum, to the newspaper. “It is not impossible that in a few years we will have the product I just talked about – a highly effective seasonal flu vaccine and a COVID vaccine – for you each year at your pharmacy.”
For contextual purposes, the flu vaccine created for the 2019-2020 season was about 45% effective in preventing diseases, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
WHAT HAPPENED TO CORONAVIRUS, ‘TWIN-DEMIC’ FLU? EXPERT WEIGHTS
Bancel said the biotech giant would use innovative messenger RNA (mRNA) technology to create the double vaccine, the same technology that was used to create its initial COVID-19 vaccine. The Pfizer-BioNTech jab was also created using mRNA technology.
Both vaccines were the fastest to be developed and could bring a new era of vaccine development, experts say, as the technology can be used to improve existing vaccines and create new ones for a range of diseases.
In the year that the new coronavirus was, the flu was in the background, with cases at historic lows. Experts who previously spoke to Fox News about lower than normal flu activity this year said that preventive measures to protect against COVID-19 – how to wear masks, social detachment, wash your hands often and avoid crowds in environments closed – probably played a role in keeping the flu at bay.
Leaving aside this 2020-2021 flu season, the CDC estimates that the flu has resulted in about 12,000 to 61,000 deaths annually since 2010.
CLICK HERE FOR FULL CORONAVIRUS COVERAGE
The news came after Moderna announced last month that the modified COVID-19 vaccine it developed to deal with the South African coronavirus variant was ready to be tested in humans in clinical trials.
Moderna in a press release at the time said it had sent the first batch of doses of the new jab to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to initiate a Phase 1 “clinical trial that will be conducted and funded by the NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). “
The new vaccine candidate, called mRNA-1273,351, was created to better deal with the South African variant after the company’s existing vaccine has been shown to have reduced efficacy against the mutation.