HHS Investing $500 Million To Develop Universal Vaccines

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is investing half a billion dollars into a project that seeks to develop universal vaccinations for numerous viruses, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

The project is called “Generation Gold Standard.” It seeks to use chemically inactivated whole viruses, which is how flu vaccines were created decades ago. Currently, flu vaccines contain synthetic viral proteins or pieces of viruses.

The goal is to create these vaccines with such technology that are “universal,” meaning they will protect against multiple strains of a virus, like the flu, coronavirus, and RSV.

The new project would shift HHS from its current COVID projects and use funding from larger cuts the department has already made.

For example, The Journal noted that under former President Joe Biden, HHS developed a $5 billion project called NextGen, which studied new COVID vaccines. Under HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., NextGen has been deemed “wasteful,” and several of the projects within NextGen have been given stop-work orders.

Generation Gold Standard will give the American public “a cost-effective, accountable alternative” to COVID vaccines and therapeutics, an HHS spokesperson told the Journal.

Next year, the project aims to begin trials for a universal flu vaccination, which would protect against numerous strains. Another goal is for trials for a universal coronavirus vaccine to start by 2026, “with FDA approval targeted for 2029.”

Two scientists with senior roles in the project are Dr. Matthew Memoli, the principal deputy director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger, acting director of NIH’s infectious-diseases institute.

“Our commitment is clear: every innovation in vaccine development must be grounded in gold standard science and transparency,” Secretary Kennedy said in a statement.

Under Kennedy, HHS has already made shifts in funding for vaccinations. For example, NIH will stop spending money to determine why Americans hesitate to get vaccines. NIH is terminating or scaling back more than 40 related grants and has said that such spending no longer aligns with NIH priorities.

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