Launched in October 1994, with 123.9 million visitors
from Nov 2017 to Jan 2018, including 23.33 million monthly unique visitors
(www.similarweb.com), Wired is not only a “historical” online
technology magazine, but it is still one of the most authoritative. It is rare
that Wired dedicates one of its main articles to a health theme, yet, on
Feb 1, the magazine published a full piece entirely devoted to flu
vaccines. This article is part of a wider media campaign on next-generation flu vaccines, which are expected - as the story goes
- to meet the challenges posed by ongoing virus mutations.
Why are media so interested in
flu vaccines? The
search for the universal flu vaccine is not at all novel,
although new approaches are in the pipeline.
This flu season has been one of the worst of the last decade, and this could be
a possible explanation. However, the actual reason is probably more mundane;
quite simply, 2018 is the 100th anniversary of the 1918 influenza pandemics.
Anniversaries prompt ideas, initiatives, and, ultimately, business.
On January 15th, Vaccitech, an Oxford
University spin-out company developing a universal flu vaccine,
announced to have been granted with £20m by two major venture capital
firms, GV (the
venture capital arm of Alphabet,
the parent company of Google), and Sequoia Capital China, the fifth yuan-denominated fund,
which has in its portfolio internet giant Alibaba. On January 19th, Vaccitech announced to be about to start a
phase 2 trial for a universal flu vaccine.
Many other teams are working
on next-generation flu vaccines, including the Palese Laboratory
in the Department of Microbiology at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount
Sinai in New York, supported by GlaxoSmithKline and Gates Foundation; and
the American biotech firm, FluGen,
which was awarded on October 2017 with $14.4 million by the U.S. Department of
Defense to enter human trial with RedeeFlu, an experimental flu
vaccine.
The most challenging
enterprise, is, however, the Universal Influenza Vaccine
Initiative (UIVI), launched by the Human Vaccines Project,
“a
global nonprofit that brings together leading stakeholders across academia,
industry, governments and nonprofits”, funded inter alia
by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Vanderbilt
University Medical Center, the J. Craig Venter Institute, and
drug companies such as GlaxoSmithKline, Janssen, Pfizer, Sanofi
Pasteur, and still others. The Universal Influenza Vaccine Initiative is more
ambitious than any other project previously mentioned because it aims “to
harness the human immune system to prevent and control disease in ways
previously considered unimaginable (…) Decoding the human immune system holds
the key to the development of such new and improved vaccines. Deciphering the
human immunome, the universal and common elements of the B and T cell receptors
that make up the adaptive immune system, will facilitate germline targeting and
structure-assisted vaccine discovery”. The UIVI proposes itself
as the new Human Genome Project, the greatest scientific enterprise
for the next decade. This is also echoed by Michael Osterholm -
director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP)
at the University of Minnesota, and influential public health and a biosecurity
scientist – who
argues that universal flu vaccine needs an initiative similar to
the Manhattan Project, the U.S. atomic bomb programme during World War II.
This editor has not the
scientific expertise necessary to evaluate whether we truly need a new
Manhattan Project (admittedly, it is not the most reassuring comparison one
could use). The recent history is full of attempts to build great
scientific enterprises; sometimes they succeed, other times they just
generate bombastic “collateral campaigns,” to evoke Musil’s novel, “The Man
Without Qualities.” One thing is for sure; the current universal flu
vaccine campaign makes one wonders about scientists’ communication
skills. Using the 100th anniversary of the 1918 influenza pandemics to
raise public awareness is laudable but doing it by overturning years and years
of health communication policies is crazy. Since October 2017, when news about
universal flu vaccine started spreading, web searches on “universal flu vaccine” have
been going up and
fluctuating in parallel with queries on “flu vaccine effectiveness” and
on “flu shot side effects.” For ages, people have been told that
vaccines are always effective – although medical literate people knew that
things were more nuanced than naive popularizations -
now nonchalant articles and broadcasts are informing
everybody, almost casually, that “flu
vaccine is only about 10 percent to 30 percent effective”. The least that
could happen is that those who vaccinated themselves, feel deceived, and those
who did not, find their doubts fully confirmed.
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