Making Flu Vaccination Over Twice as Effective With a Pro-Active Public Health System

Flu vaccination effectiveness has ranged from 10-60% over the past 20 years. This compares with the 90+% effectiveness of the new COVID-19 vaccines. The reason for this is that national health agencies monitor a few thousand samples globally and then ramp up chicken egg production of flu vaccines six months in advance of the fall vaccination season.

We know all of the strains and variants of the flu virus that exist. We do not have to guess which ones will become the dominant flu in the flu season.

Nextbigfuture has proposed a pandemic monitoring and early warning system that is combined with pre-creating and pre-testing vaccines. This same process can be used for all flu virus variants.

Early Detection Systemn for Flu and Pandemic

A recent research study looked back at 7389 blood donations in December, 2019 and found 1% of the US population already had COVID-19 at that time. This means with 3-4 day doubling times for the spread if we increased the sampling level we could detect pandemics and flu variants at the 0.001% of population levels. Every 8X increase gives the global system 9-12 days earlier detection of a spreading pandemic. We would be able to clearly identify the exact flu variants emerging for this year.

Monitoring to 1 million people every month around the world. Each major region China, America, Europe, Asia and Africa etc… would sample 100,000 blood donations every month and look for potential pandemic viruses and the flu variant. We need to bring the cost of blood sample screening down to less than $100 per sample. This could be done for $1 billion or 2 billion per year.

We would not have to guess which flu variant is emerging.

Prepare Vaccines Against All Flu Variants Ahead of Time

We would spend $20-30 million to prepare vaccines against each specific flu variant and all of the known potential pandemic viruses. We would also constantly monitor nearby animal populations (bats, pigs, chickens etc…) for new emerging strains of flu or potential pandemic.

We get all of the vaccines for flu and pandemics through phase 1 and phase 2 safety trials and through as much of phase 3 effective tests as possible.

A recent paper written by Krammer in the Journal Cell indicates phase I clinical work and the larger, longer Phase II safety trials can be done ahead of time. All before the arrival of new pandemics. Some Phase III efficacy testing could be done before pandemics. We can check if the vaccines provoke the right immune response. We can make antigens in the research center and just test it and it would be inexpensive. A Phase III trial if it were deemed necessary could be done in ten weeks.

No guessing. We would have the monitoring and the data to precisely vaccinate against whatever is the exact virus problem for flu or pandemics. We keep the vaccine effectiveness up over 90% and maybe over 95%.

The global flu season costs about 200,000 to 600,000 lives and $200 billion in medical costs and lost business productivity.

The infectious disease early warning and monitoring and system and full vaccine preparedness would cost about $10 billion per year. Even a 90% effective vaccine is not 100%. Therefore we still maintain wide-scale virus testing capacity and upgrade to Taiwan caliber contact tracing and keep high hygiene levels.

These actions would not harm the world economy. People in Asia that were impacted by SARS maintained a mask-wearing culture from 2005 to 2019 even before COVID. Keeping the mask-wearing culture and keeping hygiene would massively slow the spread and give even more time for early warning to a fully vaccinated population.

Having rules that requiring hourly hand cleaning at airports, rail stations, airplanes, cruise ships, large offices and at mass events would reduce global spread by 80% and massively slow the spread of all new infectious diseases.

This will save global money and lives. Is there a reason we want to keep guessing and remain blind to disease spread?

We collect the blood anyway. We just have to test a small percentage of the volume of blood from each blood donation. We can pre-build the complete arsenal of vaccines against flu and pandemics.

This is the power of being fully pro-active on public health.

SOURCES- CDC, Journal Cell
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com

10 thoughts on “Making Flu Vaccination Over Twice as Effective With a Pro-Active Public Health System”

  1. Aren't normal general flu vaccines made from early sampling from western and central china (the usual start point for the next flu wave) for candidate types, and then they select two of type A and two of type B, and generally do not vaccinate for type C and D? I vaguely remember there are practical reasons from this, ranging from the appropriateness of the selected ones, to actual manufacturing/logistics issues.

  2. Did they save water samples?
    “On 10 January 2020, the first novel coronavirus genome sequence was made publicly available [3]. The sequence was deposited in the GenBank database (accession number MN908947) and uploaded to the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data (GISAID)”
    Nobody had the sequence for COVID-19 until January 10, 2020 so it couldn’t have been detected by PCR in March 2019.
    Preserving samples for future testing is a good idea, was it done in Spain?

  3. Are you suggesting that being immunised against many flu variants, but not the current one, would make the current flu worse? Why? How would that work?

  4. "Not really, tests are performed by specialized people and it takes time to get the results, so at best some people will get tested periodically, this is evolves a massive economic and social effort so the system cannot maintain the pace for long unless more efficient ways off testing and tracing are developed."

    This article talks about using quick tests anyone can do on themselves at home. Even if the false positives & negatives are more frequent, it still works better because the cases are caught & people know to self isolate
    https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/nov-28-quick-tests-for-covid-rat-hides-poison-in-its-fur-neuroscientists-see-how-we-see-colour-and-more-1.5817870/could-quick-covid-antigen-tests-break-the-back-of-the-pandemic-1.5817885

  5. The Spaniards clocked their first waste water cases back to March 2019. Me thinks that a less virulent bug came into humans for maybe years and quietly spread until a few critical mutation suddenly made it more communicable and more deadly to reach clinical importance and then pandemic spread. Kinda like HIV was detected in the late 1950s in the USA.

  6. I think I MAY have gotten Covid in early 2020. In Feb I visited Israel on Christian oriented tour. We were in densely packed chapels with Asians singing hymns. I never felt sick but experienced plummet in energy since March. Slowly regaining energy. I intend to take vaccine when available. Age 82.

  7. Too simple. What emerges is what we don’t inoculate against. You assume that there are a few strains. The real problem is that the high mutation rate and production lag means that there are always strains we don’t cover which then becomes the dominant actor that year. If we’re lucky, cross immunity prevents the majority from spreading. If not, then worse than usual.

  8. "People will be tested often at the entrance to gathering places. The
    results will show and will be demonstrable on a dedicated phone app or a
    separate dedicated device. "
    – Not really, tests are performed by specialized people and it takes time to get the results, so at best some people will get tested periodically, this is evolves a massive economic and social effort so the system cannot maintain the pace for long unless more efficient ways off testing and tracing are developed.

    "It should not be acceptable anymore that anyone who has the flu or any
    other transmittable disease can go on the bus or to work or school with
    other people."
    – Thats too radical, Imagine convincing people that… ,well if that person can work from home I don't see a problem with this, in fact not infecting people at work is more productive for the company, if you must go to work wearing a mask is a good alternative although if the symptoms are to great is impossible to wear a mask. It should not be matter of prohibition either, at least in some cases.

  9. There is little reason to think that the 1% December 2019 number is not simply an artifact of the antibody test – just error. A MUCH stronger measure in advance of community spread is PCR of waste water. PCR doesn’t produce false positives the way the antibody tests do. This has been successfully applied with Covid and has predicted later rates weeks in advance. It’s cheaper and easier. No need for medical samples with privacy concerns. Anonymous Poop flowing through the sewer system is fair game for public health testing.

  10. interesting. But if vaccinating against one strain emerging as dominant will not make another one dominant instead? Isn't it part of the reason that we are having now with predicting flu strains?
    The sensors and the system that are now being developed to detect covid19 can be used in some variation against the flu.
    People will be tested often at the entrance to gathering places. The results will show and will be demonstrable on a dedicated phone app or a separate dedicated device.
    It should not be acceptable anymore that anyone who has the flu or any other transmittable disease can go on the bus or to work or school with other people.

Comments are closed.