March 20, 2023 – Three major vaccine makers say they’ll easily produce tons of of hundreds of thousands of bird flu vaccines for humans should the H5N1 influenza virus ever make the leap to people.
The three corporations are GSK, Moderna and CSL Seqirus, whose representatives said Reuters that the vaccines at the moment are being tested on humans. Most of the vaccines that might be quickly available are already reserved for wealthy countries.
“In a flu outbreak, we could potentially have a much worse problem with vaccine hoarding and vaccine nationalism than with COVID,” Dr. Richard Hatchett, executive director of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, told the news agency.
The CDC sees the chance that bird flu will turn into a public health problem remains lowBut the duration of this bird flu outbreak and the reported spread from birds to mammals comparable to foxes, mink and seals are cause for concern, scientists say.
“With outbreaks in animals, we tend to see them appear and then disappear, usually within a season,” said Johns Hopkins School of Public Health Epidemiologist and environmental microbiologist Meghan Frost Davis, DVM, PhD. “What's unusual about this disease is that it has been going on for some time, starting sometime in 2021, with various substrains evolving. It is persistent and widespread, and has now affected an estimated 58 million birds in the United States and worldwide.”
Vaccine manufacturers' preparations for a possible endemic or pandemic of the H5N1 virus in humans are the newest response to the avian influenza outbreak, which has to date been addressed by culling bird populations.
Last month, the Biden administration announced that the U.S. will test a vaccine on industrial poultry. The CDC can be urging industrial laboratory test manufacturers to think about developing tests for H5N1 much like the coronavirus tests. The New York Times reported.