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The flu shot finally gets an upgrade

Moderna’s new mRNA vaccine could improve flu protection, but the holy grail is a universal vaccine.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

The Food and Drug Administration approved Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine this week — a major public health breakthrough for an administration that’s been troublingly down on vaccines.

The flu is a gigantic and costly illness, causing 1 billion infections and 300,000 deaths each year. But this new shot, built on advances from the Covid-19 pandemic, is expected to outperform the standard flu vaccine that we’ve used, largely unchanged, for the past 80 years.

The new shot fixes a problem that has long bedeviled the traditional vaccine: the gap between how quickly the flu virus mutates and how slowly vaccines are produced. The flu is changing constantly. But under current methods, manufacturing a flu vaccine — which, to my enormous fascination, most commonly involves secret chicken........

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