Using gene-editing, they created more than 80,000 variations of the hemagglutinin protein with changes in one portion right on the top of the head domain and then tested a vaccine filled with a mixture of these variations on mice and ferrets.
It seems this "new strategy" is basically the brute-force approach.
Maybe a decade or two ago I would've been more optimistic, but it's very much in their economic interests to not have long-lasting immunity.
> it's very much in their economic interests to not have long-lasting immunity.
Whose interests? This is publicly funded (NIH) research from a lab at Duke, which is a university with a massive nonprofit medical center. Government is paying the cost of R&D and it is in the financial interests of the US government to fund development and testing of a long lasting vaccine. Think of the savings to Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA.
I don't know why this is downvoted; perhaps it was not clear that I am talking about the US federal government specifically, through the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, set up by a 1986 law. Without it companies were giving up on making or developing vaccines due to liability.
It seems this "new strategy" is basically the brute-force approach.
Maybe a decade or two ago I would've been more optimistic, but it's very much in their economic interests to not have long-lasting immunity.