Moderna will receive $176 million to develop a pandemic flu vaccine for humans following a worrying outbreak of bird flu in dairy cows across the country, federal officials announced Tuesday.
“We have successfully leveraged lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic to better prepare for future health crises,” Health Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a press release on Tuesday. “As we do so, we continue to develop new vaccines and other tools to fight influenza and strengthen our pandemic response capabilities.”
The federal funds will go toward late-stage development of an mRNA-based vaccine against influenza that uses similar technology to the COVID-19 vaccine and is meant to hurry up the response to similar future public health threats, Moderna said Tuesday. The company is already working on developing the vaccine, and if early results are positive, development could move into late-stage testing next yr.
Bird flu, an H5N1 variant of the flu, is a highly contagious type of viral infection. An outbreak of the virus was first reported in several states in late March, in keeping with the CDC. This was the primary time that bird flu virus was detected in cows.
The CDC continues to take care of that “the current risk to the general population from avian influenza viruses is low,” although the geographic spread of infection in dairy cows “may create additional opportunities for humans to be exposed to these viruses.” Mammal-to-mammal transmission of the virus is believed to be rare.
Mammals can change into infected with the disease by “eating infected birds, poultry, or other animals and/or being exposed to an environment contaminated with the virus,” the CDC says.
The federal funding for the vaccine comes from the Department of Health and Human Services' Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), a program focused on developing countermeasures to public health threats. The department's press release said the funds would also help “support a fair pricing arrangement that continues to ensure equitable access to vaccines on an ongoing basis.”
The mRNA technology used to develop the COVID-19 vaccine offers “advantages in terms of efficacy, speed of development, and scalability and reliability of production,” said Stéphane Bancel, CEO of Moderna, on Tuesday.
The company said it began collecting safety and other data on the vaccine in healthy adults ages 18 and older in 2023. Results are expected in 2024 and can “feed into Phase 3 development plans,” Moderna added.
Federal officials stressed that the event of vaccine technology enables a faster response to potential recent threats.
“Adding this technology to our pandemic influenza toolkit will give us more flexibility and speed to respond to the strains in circulation and their potential variants,” said Dawn O'Connell, undersecretary of state for preparedness and response.
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