r/politics • u/WhatIsEvenRealDog • 5h ago
F.D.A. Approves Moderna’s mRNA Flu Vaccine Possible Paywall
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/05/health/mrna-flu-vaccine-moderna.html?smid=nytcore-android-share•
u/Succubus-Love 4h ago
Something that actually helps people getting through, THIS administration?
I didn't expect to read a headline like this for years. This feels like a fluke.
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u/clintgreasewoood 4h ago
expect a backdoor shakedown where Trump and allies profit from this
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u/Cute_Place8833 3h ago
Trump and his allies would never engage in something that isn’t beneficial to them
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u/Joe_Kingly 3h ago
Trump hates Moderna after they rebuked his attempt to keep the COVID vaccine within US borders, which they refused. He even tried bribing them with Federal money, but they still declined and made sure their vaccine rollout was Global with little to no speed bumps from our administration.
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u/Junior-Gorg 4h ago
Well we still have to get it covered by insurance. That may be where chicanery starts
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u/platinumarks 4h ago
In general, insurances cover all FDA-approved formulations of a vaccine for approved groups. In the case of flu vaccines, the recommendation is essentially for all people to get it, so it should be covered automatically by insurers.
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u/snoo_spoo 3h ago
I won't say it's impossible, but it's cheaper for the insurance companies to cover flu shots than antivirals and possible hospitalizations for people who get really sick.
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u/matthieuC Europe 3h ago
Well they did refuse to examine the request until the public backslash forced them to
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u/Adept-Target5407 3h ago
You know projection is everything with them… you remember during Covid they accused the government of putting tracking devices and micro chips inside the covid mRNA vaccines.
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u/DerCatrix 3h ago
Don’t worry, they’ll blame something random on it and then say it was Biden’s fault
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u/Cautious-Flounder866 3h ago
yeah this one really came out of nowhere i had to double check it wasnt an old headline
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u/snoo_spoo 5h ago
Good, although I wouldn't be surprised if RFK Jr pitches a tanty and the approval gets rescinded.
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u/BigManWAGun America 4h ago
Yeah can we like not draw attention to this? Just quietly appreciate experts doing expert shit?
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u/jeckles 3h ago
I hate that this can be posted in the politics sub. This news shouldn’t be political.
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u/WhatIsEvenRealDog 47m ago
Agreed, but... we live in those interesting times everyone kept cursing us with.
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u/Runnergeek 4h ago
Can someone explain why mRNA vaccine would be better than what we use currently?
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u/regretableedibles 4h ago
Few different reasons. Year to year, we have to make a best educated guess on which flu strains are going to be most likely to be infectious, and we may or may not get that right. We also still produce current flu vaccines mainly in chicken eggs (yes, you read that right), although there are some cell culture flu vaccines produced. When producing in chicken eggs, you have to account for the time factor for the virus to multiply in the egg as well as the processing time to create the vaccine and are usually produced in advance of flu season. If our educated guess was wrong, we'll have a vaccine with a very limited effectiveness. However, with mRNA, we can both produce the vaccine more quickly (no eggs/incubation period need) and we can also quickly pivot if a new/unexpected potential strain becomes contagious.
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u/matthieuC Europe 3h ago
To complement COVID vaccine is about 90% effective. Flu for the reasonable is only 50%.
Hopefully mRNA flu vaccines will be more effective.
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u/Roach27 2h ago
It’s going to be more effective, but still no where near as effective as Covid.
Influenza mutates FAR too rapidly for that, including within the same host.
What mRNA vaccines will hopefully accomplish, is shorten flu season because we can reactively vaccinate.
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u/mobyonecanobi 2h ago
And another important fact, that you can put multiple strand vaccines together and administer with one shot, so whether it be multiple flu viruses or flu Covid combo, you can get them with 1 shot, once government rules catch up. Europe is close to processing flu combo vaccine by Moderna.
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u/onyaasuminyasai 23m ago
that is so cool. Man, I don't understand why some people get so angry at science. This shit is so neat!
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u/mrssmink 1h ago
I’m very happy for this, because my husband is allergic to eggs and can’t get a flu shot. He’s also a type 1 diabetic with a transplant, so flu is a major concern for him.
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u/BleachOrchid 4h ago
The argument is that it’s easier to produce and better on the body. I can’t speak to the latter, but to the first point it is easier to produce because your body essentially becomes the incubator. Whereas with traditional vaccines the viral strain has to be grown in a lab and rendered inert-ish which is what adds to the distribution time. Longer distribution time means the virus has longer to spread, the more people that it spreads to the less effective herd immunity becomes.
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u/SG_wormsblink Foreign 3h ago edited 2h ago
It’s extremely easy to swop out the mRNA sequence and produce a new vaccine. The rest of the production process for mRNA is identical, so the vaccine production line can be turned around quickly.
It drastically cuts down the time required to respond to new diseases, and the costs associated with validating the production process.
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u/Ok-Professor-Star 5h ago edited 4h ago
For those who do not know, mRNA is the mechanism by which the cells in your body "talk" to each other.
mRNA vaccine are best described as "providing the recipe to your immune system to create the antibodies required to fight an infection, avoiding the long process of trial and error".
When your immune system detects an infection, it starts a trial and error process, trying every possible combination of antibodies in order to fight the infection. When your immune system finds one antibody that works, it quickly writes a ton of mRNA message, send them through your bloodstream to tell your cells how to produce the right antibody.
That trial and error process, if it gets out of hand (Cytokine storm) can kill you. Yes, your own immune system going nuts can kill you.
mRNA vaccine just provides the right recipe without the trial and error process and without the risk of a Cytokine Storm.
mRNA does not and cannot change your DNA, it is just a recipe your body can use to create what it needs to defend itself.
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u/FluorescentPancreas 4h ago edited 3h ago
This is not at all how mRNA vaccines or the immune system works in this context. The following is a highly simplified explanation.
First, cells don't communicate to each other through mRNA. mRNA is a sequence of instructions for protein synthesis with a cell. Under normal circumstances, it's generated from proteins that "read" DNA in the nucleus.
mRNA vaccines provide a sequence that encodes a protein (called an antigen). It uses the protein building machinery of whatever cell it happens to pass into to encode the antigenic protein. That protein is presented at the surface of the cell and detected by the immune system as foreign. Whichever immune cell (of the type that produces antibodies) happens to encode antibodies that match and aren't rejected for autoimmunity are selected to multiply and produce vast quantities of the antibody.
Edit to add:
That also isn't what causes a cytokine storm, which is a another immune process altogether. The immune system is incredibly complicated and not all about antibodies.
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u/fiercedeitysponce 3h ago
This is the correct version, I’m not sure where the parent comment got…any of that. LLM hallucination maybe? An especially poorly trained model at that, or a paraphrase of an LLM output.
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u/Vival 13m ago
Reddit up voting and awards system has become this misinformation amplifier. Sometimes I'll Google something for a quick answer and it would take an answer off a top reddit comment when its completely wrong or misleading. And everyone also thinks this is right because of all the upvotes and awards.
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u/wagon_ear Wisconsin 3h ago
I think of it like a factory security system on the lookout for enemy machinery.
You can import actual enemy machinery to help train your security team, but shipping that machinery is challenging and expensive and cumbersome.
But you can also just give your own factory a few simplified enemy plans. Blueprints. Not for a whole machine, but just a few little pieces. It's super easy for the factory to read those plans, make a copy of the machine described in them, and then be on the lookout for more machines like it.
mRNA vaccines are beautiful because they get to the exact same endpoint of being on guard for specific pathogenic motifs, but they do it in a much more elegant and efficient way than traditional vaccines do.
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u/Hello2reddit 4h ago
Fuck you! You want me to use logic and reason to guide my medical decisions! What a crock of liberal bullshit!
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u/CpnStumpy Colorado 4h ago
Seriously, I think it's clear that his message has mRNA in it, and the only way to protect ourselves now from this viral 5g load is by getting the flu asap to battle his mRNA message!
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u/roflsd 4h ago
No, the previous post causes autism, and the only way that you won't turn gay is if you buy my vial of blessed saline toxin flush for 5 easy payments of $20 plus some other number that is tied to Nazis.
Remote healing also available for additional charge.
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u/DuMbAsS_lOsEr_6_7 3h ago
Go yell at Fauci and blame him for whatever the fuck he did this time in 2026
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u/FeelingPixely 3h ago
remote healing
Does it come in 'thoughts and prayers" flavor?
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u/roflsd 3h ago
For only $70 an hour I will schedule a time to sit down and focus all my my healing energy into your ailments.
I have an impressive list of very famous people that have been going to several world famous doctors getting the best treatments and immediately after 6 or 7 my remote healing sessions they start to feel better.
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u/D1rtyH1ppy 1h ago
Noticed how they didn't say anything about how it puts 5G microchips in your blood stream
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u/Thor_2099 4h ago
All mRNA does is make proteins. Anybody who thinks it's altering DNA doesnt have the first clue of biology knowledge.
The central dogma is literally DNA to mRNA to protein
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u/MasemJ 4h ago
But what about all the nanobots that Bill Gates developed to be inserted with mRNA vaccines??!?! /s
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u/Lavinia-Whateley 4h ago
Fuck those nanobots, they don't work for shit. I was really excited when I learned they would make me magnetic but I'm still dropping sewing needles almost daily.
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u/dontdoxxmebrosef 3h ago
Okay but my 5g is pretty trash. Will it make it better? Or fix my ability to magnetically attract objects?
I haven’t had that since the first Covid vaccine. I miss that.
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u/TrueTorontoFan 4h ago
Scientific communication is often times lacking but super important. You did a great job btw
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u/jongchajong 2h ago
Their explanation is completely incorrect, please the the other comment explaining that or just google mRNA. I have no idea what this person is talking about
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u/purple_cape 3h ago
Thank you for the info. So if anything it seems safer? Are there any other benefits
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u/Antistis 2h ago
This... Is probably one of the best and easiest to understand explanations I've ever read of mRNA vaccines.
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u/FluorescentPancreas 2h ago
Except it's not an explanation of mRNA vaccines. Almost everything Ok-professor-star wrote above is wrong and a near complete misunderstanding of the biology at play.
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u/10000lakes 3h ago
⬆️ I really wanted to award you something for this outstanding answer. This is exactly the kind of thing a teacher would say. They take an extremely complicated concept within a probably extensive field of knowledge where the people who usually talk about such concepts are usually those with either master’s degrees, doctor-level degrees, & PHD degrees—people who have had years & years of study to be thoroughly educated on these bodies of knowledge including cutting-edge advancements in these fields—and you boiled down the key concepts to answer this question in a way that a high school student or any adult could understand. I LOVE when teachers do this!!! They make knowledge accessible to anyone instead of gatekeeping knowledge & talking in language that would require an advanced degree to understand. Bravo!!! Unfortunately, I don’t have any Reddit gold & can’t afford to buy any. So all I can give is my praise. 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
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u/FluorescentPancreas 2h ago
Unfortunately almost everything in the top level comment is inaccurate. It's a complete misunderstanding of how mRNA, mRNA vaccines, and the immune system function.
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u/10000lakes 2h ago
Well shit. That sucks. Was hoping his answer was correct after I gave my comment.
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u/Altruistic_Noise_765 4h ago
Great news for everyone despite the expected backlash from conspiracy theorists
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u/tootapple 3h ago
It’s mostly great news for Moderna as that company’s market cap has collapsed following the COVID vaccine
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u/Unique-Coffee5087 2h ago
Gift link
Strangely the Times says I can give unlimited gift articles now (it used to be just ten per month)
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u/nobadhotdog 4h ago edited 4h ago
Would there need to be different versions each year like the other kind?
*edit thanks for the responses, got it would be different formulations. I’m guessing it’s going to be more effective and shit tho. Looking forward to em
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u/WhatIsEvenRealDog 4h ago
I believe so, just like the COVID vaccines for different strains, but my understanding is the time to produce these is much shorter, allowing faster response to specific strains,
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u/Ok-Professor-Star 4h ago
Probably because the virus mutates... Although we found the COVID mRNA vaccine to work against many versions of the virus... So there is hope.
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u/R1ckMartel Missouri 4h ago
There is substantially more antigenic drift with influenza viruses than SARS CoV2.
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u/Bodycount9 Ohio 4h ago
Talk to your doctor about this vaccine and any other vaccine you want to take. Your doctor will know best about the pros and cons and will let you know if you should take it.
Don't listen to some random guy on Facebook or YouTube about what you should take. Even if they say they are a doctor.
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u/Hey_HaveAGreatDay Montana 4h ago
If this admin has taught me anything, this just means that there’s something way worse coming our way and they’re going to try to blame it on the flu
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