The unprecedented subsidy of $ 500 million from the Trump administration for a largely protective flu vaccine confused vaccine and pandemic experts, who said that the project was at the start, was on old technology and was only one of the more than 200 efforts of this type.
The Secretary of Health and Social Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., changed money from a pandemic preparation fund to a vaccine development program led by two scientists that the administration recently appointed senior positions to the National Institutes of Health.
While some experts were delighted that Kennedy has supported any vaccination project, they said that the May 1 announcement had counterbalanced a healthy scientific policy, seemed to arbitrary and raised the types of questions on the conflicts of interest that have rekindled many actions by President Donald Trump.
The concentration of vast resources on a single vaccinating candidate “is a bit like going to Kentucky Derby and put all your money on a horse,” said William Schaffner, professor at Vanderbilt University and former president of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases. “In science, we normally put money on a certain number of different horses because we cannot be completely sure that will win.”
Others have been mystified by the decision, since the candidate vaccine uses a technology that has been largely abandoned in the 1970s and the avoidance techniques developed in recent decades thanks to the funding of the Ministry of Health and Social Services and the Department of Defense.
“This is not a new generation vaccine,” said Rick Bright, who directed the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority de HHS, or Barda, in the first Trump administration. “It’s so lately generation, or first generation, it’s breathtaking.”
The vaccine is being developed at the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases of Jeffery Taubenberger, whom Trump appointed acting chief of the Institute at the end of April, and his colleague Matthew Memoli, critic of the 19 -year -old American policy that Trump designed to lead the NIH until April 1, when Jay Bhattacharya had his functions. Bhattacharya appointed Memoli his main deputy.
Taubenberger acquired a reputation as a scientist of the Institute of Pathology of the Armed Forces in 1997 when his laboratory sequenced the genome of the 1918 pandemic influenza virus, using samples of American troops troops that died in this plague. He joined the NIH in 2006.
In a press release on May 1, HHS called the Taubenberger-Memoli vaccine initiative “General Gold Standard”, affirming that it represented “a decisive change towards transparency, efficiency and complete preparation”. Bhattacharya said he was a “paradigm change”.
But the objective of NIH vaccines to create a shot that protects against multiple flu stumps or all vaccines – currently vaccines must be administered each year to take into account changes in the virus – is not new.
The director of Niaid, Anthony Fauci, launched a network of university researchers in pursuing a largely protective influenza vaccine in 2019. In addition to that Consortium led by NIHMore than 200 influenza vaccines are under development in the United States and other countries.
Many use more recent technologies, and some are at more advanced stages of human tests than the Taubenberger vaccine, the approach of which appears essentially the same as that used in flu vaccines from 1944, said Bright.
In the press release, HHS described the vaccine as “in advanced tests” and said that it would induce “robust” responses and “sustainable protection”. But Taubenberger and his colleagues have not yet published a complete human study of the vaccine. A study showing the vaccine The protected mice of the flu appeared in 2022.
For operation Warp Speed, which led to the creation of the vaccine covids during Trump’s first term, government scientists examined detailed plans and data from academic and commercial laboratories in the running for federal money, said Greg PolandA flu expert and president of the Attia Health Academy of Science and Medicine. “If it happens here, it’s opaque for me,” he said.
When asked what data beyond his press release supported the decision, HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon said the agency’s declaration of a page. When asked if the decision restricts the funding of the consortium created by Faucia or other universal vaccine approaches, Nixon did not respond specifically. “Generation Gold Standard is the most promising,” he said in an email.
Taubenberger did not respond to a request for comments. The spokesperson for Nixon and NIH, Amanda Fine, did not respond to requests from an interview with Taubenberger or Memoli.
The HHS declaration stressed that by developing the internal vaccine, the government “ensures radical transparency, public responsibility and freedom of conflicts of commercial interests”. Although any vaccine should possibly be carried out commercially, the participation of NIHs in other development stages could give the government a greater influence on the possible price of any vaccine, said Schaffner.
If the CRA plans based on the mRNA produced by Moderna and Pfizer-Biontech represented the cutting edge of vaccine technology, applying ultra-sophisticated approaches never seen before in an inoculation, the approach of Taubenberger and Memoli represents an explosion of the past.
Their vaccine is made by inactivating influenza viruses with a carcinogenic chemical called beta-propopone. Scientists have used the chemical to neutralize viruses since at least the 1950s. This method of inactivating the whole virus, mainly using other chemicals, was the standard means of making flu vaccines in the 1970s, when it was modified, in part because whole virus vaccines caused high fevers or even crises in children.
The limited published data of the Taubenberger vaccine, From a first security test Implying 45 patients, has not shown no major side effects. Scientists test the vaccine as a regular photo and as an intranasal spray with the idea of stopping the virus in the airways before it causes a large infection.
“The notion of a universal flu of a pandemic vaccine is good,” said Poland, who described Taubenberger as a scientist. But he added: “I’m not so sure of the platform, and the dollar amount is a headache. This vaccine is in very early development.”
Paul Friedrichs, an Air Force retirement general who led the Office of the Pandemic Preparation and Response Policy to the White House of President Joe Biden, said that “giving $ 500 million in advance with very little data to support it is different from everything I have ever seen.”
“Vaccine development technology has evolved enormously in many decades,” said Friedrichs. “Why would we come back to an approach historically associated with more or more frequent unwanted events?”
The government seemed to transfer money for the development of the Taubenberger vaccine from a $ 1.3 billion vaccination fund existing in the Nextgen project, a program mainly focused on Barda in Barda, Friedrichs said. Most of this money has been reserved to support advanced research on the cocoan and other viral vaccines, including those protected from emerging diseases.
It is “very worrying that we detecting the accent on the coded, which we can live to regret,” said Poland. “It assumes that we will not have a cocovated variant which escapes the current moderately high levels of immunity covers.”
Nixon said that the Nextgen project, for which some funds have been reserved for mRNA research, is being examined. Kennedy criticizes mRNA vaccines, pretending once, that they are the deadliest vaccines in history.
Ted Ross, director of global vaccine development at the Cleveland Clinic, said that he was “happy to see them invest in respiratory vaccines, including a universal flu vaccine, with all the programs they have reduced”.
“But I don’t think it’s the only approach,” said Ross. “Other universal influenza vaccines are underway, and their success and their failure are not yet known.”
His team, which is part of the consortium of influenza vaccines funded by Niaid, uses artificial intelligence and computer modeling to design vaccines that produce the widest immunity of flu, including seasonal and pandemic strains.
As an acting director, Memoli supervised the start of the massive administration cuts at the NIH, with the elimination of some 800 agency subsidies worth more than $ 2 billion. More than 1,200 NIH employees have been dismissed and many researchers, including Ross, are in limbo.
His laboratory is about to test a candidate vaccine on people, said Ross, while waiting to discover its NIH funding. “I don’t know if my contract is on blocking,” he said.