I keep hearing I should get a flu shot to help prevent bird flu — but I thought flu shots only prevented illness from the particular strains the shot was designed for. Does getting a traditional flu shot do anything to prevent bird flu transmission?
I keep hearing I should get a flu shot to help prevent bird flu — but I thought flu shots only prevented illness from the particular strains the shot was designed for. Does getting a traditional flu shot do anything to prevent bird flu transmission?
There are already lots of H5N1 vaccines for both animals and humans, and the US, for example, has stockpiles of millions. But if at some point the virus mutates to be able to circulate among humans (which it has not), existing vaccines would almost certainly not provide protection against that new virus. Since there is no virus like that yet, there is no vaccine for it yet, but pharmaceutical companies have been creating flu vaccines for many decades and would probably be able to create one and scale it up quickly