In April, the annual flu jab will be available in New Zealand. Photo: PEAKSTOCK / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRAR
With winter on its way in New Zealand, an immunologist is warning there could be higher levels of influenza going around in the months ahead, and is suggesting a broad spectrum flu vaccine.
Around one in four New Zealanders are infected with influenza each year, according to Te Whatu Ora.
In 2024, influenza activity in New Zealand was at moderate level, ESR reported.
But the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention found that last year's influenza vaccine was only about 35 percent effective at reducing hospitalisations in the Southern Hemisphere.
In April, the annual flu jab will be available in New Zealand. Each year it is based on the strains that are most common in the northern hemisphere during its winter.
However, Dr Jacob Glanville, a scientist and chief executive at Centivax, said they are working on a broad spectrum flu vaccine that would help immunise against several strains.
"The big issue is that seasonal vaccines have 2022 strains in them. So, there are a couple years out of date of the virus strains that are circulating," he told First Up.
"After the pandemic, I think there's been a little bit of a reduction in vaccination rates. So, you have more people walking around, not vaccinated, and then the vaccines we have don't work that well."
Dr Glanville said there isn't a vaccine for bird flu and while the United States government recently spent $590 million to ask Moderna to create a strain-specific H5N1 vaccine, they haven't built it yet.
"In any case it's going to be out of date. It's the same problem we saw during the pandemic where they make a vaccine, it looks good at first, then deteriorates in quality. But it's a problem because right now we have, since 2022, a major outbreak across the world in birds. And then since last year it's now gone into cattle. That's a big deal because those are mammals and they're hanging out with people all the time and we're starting to see spill over into the human population," he said.
"There's going to be likely some additional vaccine updates, but I think you can anticipate that there's been a pretty heavy season of influenza in particular. We also have the 'quad-demic' of coronavirus, RSV and HPV. So you can anticipate that there's likely going to be continued mismatch."
Glanville said any time there is a big season, more mutations happen. As for H5N1, experts are worried about the consequences of it going human to human.
"In the last 20 years, there's been about 1000 cases of H5N1, half of those have been lethal. That's why people are really worried. This current H5N1 for some reason doesn't look like it's that lethal. Most of the cases have been mild, but we don't know how many mutations it's going to take for that to change," Glanville said.
"We are already seeing many different new strains emerging and multiple strains even in cattle and now infecting humans, and so that vaccine. When they make it is going to be out of date. Is the classic problem we always have with flu shots."
In 2020, Glanville founded Centivax, which has a core purpose of developing universal vaccines.
"We have a pan-influenza vaccine that hits all the variant strains of the standard H1, H3, HAB. We know it also neutralises this H5N1 and all the variants we've tested," he said.
Centivax is currently in the manufacturing a stage called MCB with an Australian company called BioCina. Glanville said there is about nine months until phase one of human trials begins.
"The reason we work on universal vaccines is, for anyone who gets frustrated by taking a flu shot, and then it doesn't work, which for about two thirds of people, that's what's happened in the last season. Or if you're just tired of worrying about new strains, or you look at H5N1 and you're worried about a new pandemic, a broad spectrum vaccine fixes all that," he said.
"This is a vaccine that you take and it has broad immunity against all these new circulating strains as they emerge, which means the vaccine works a lot better, but it also means you have a population that's taking that shot to not get standard flu, but it also protects you against H5N1.
"So a broad spectrum vaccine technology ends the pandemic era as to flu. With this vaccine out in the world the news of H5N1 wouldn't be frantic worrying. It would just be like, 'oh there's an H5N1. It seems like it's hitting some cows, so just remember to get vaccinated this year,' and that would be it. It creates a radical change in human relationship to these pathogens."
Glanville still encourages everyone to get the flu shot that is available.
"I'm an asthmatic, so look vaccines aren't perfect, but they're the easiest and cheapest intervention that we have," he said.
Glanville said vaccines make it less likely patients will be sick for longer periods of time.
"So I take them for now, but also I work on universal vaccines because we have the technology in our hands to have a much better level of protection," he said.
"Humanity takes for granted that we don't really have polio as a common thing that people worry about anymore and it's within living memory that that was a major scourge. And so this is just a new technology to make flu the same way for our next generation."
Glanville said a universal or broad spectrum flu vaccine would still need to be taken every few years, as flu strains change. But he said it depends what they find in human trials.
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