Tuesday, January 21, 2025

U.S. Health and Human Services awards $590 million to aid development of Moderna human bird flu vaccine

Federal funding aims to accelerate
bird flu vaccine development. (A.S)
Despite the limited threat bird flu poses to humans, American pharmaceutical and biotechnology giant Modena received a $590 million federal package to continue its development of a bird influenza vaccine, reports Sabela Ojea of The Wall Street Journal.

The U.S. Health and Human Services Department funding aims to accelerate the company's vaccine research as worries increase about a human bird flu pandemic.

Modena began a "study to generate safety and immunogenicity data of the bird influenza shot in healthy adults ages 18 and older" in 2023, Ojea writes. "The trial included vaccine candidates against two avian influenza viruses, H5 and H7."

Avian bird flu, also known as H5N1, has decimated some global wild bird populations and killed at least 20 million egg-laying chickens in the U.S. during the last quarter of 2024, reports Alexander Tin of CBS News. In March 2024, bird flu infections were detected in U.S. dairy cattle. Since that time, there have been 66 confirmed human cases of H5N1 bird flu in the U.S., including one death from the infection.

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