How will the flu vaccine composition for 2021/22 be determined with fewer flu cases this season? | AskScience Blog

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How will the flu vaccine composition for 2021/22 be determined with fewer flu cases this season?

How will the flu vaccine composition for 2021/22 be determined with fewer flu cases this season?


How will the flu vaccine composition for 2021/22 be determined with fewer flu cases this season?

Posted: 16 Jan 2021 03:47 PM PST

The CDC says:

Flu viruses are constantly changing, so the vaccine composition is reviewed each year and updated as needed based on which influenza viruses are making people sick, the extent to which those viruses are spreading, and how well the previous season's vaccine protects against those viruses. More than 100 national influenza centers in over 100 countries conduct year-round surveillance for influenza. This involves receiving and testing thousands of influenza virus samples from patients

How will scientists decide on the strain that next season's vaccine will protect against now that flu cases are generally down?

Thanks!

submitted by /u/never_stop_asking
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How does your body know to make a new anti-body?

Posted: 16 Jan 2021 05:23 PM PST

Imagine three new substances enter your body. The first is a harmless bit of nothing. It enters your body, and just floats around for a while doing nothing. Your immune system ignores it. The second is a virus. It invades your cells and causes trouble until the immune system starts producing antibodies and destroys it. These anti-bodies stick around and are encoded into immune memory cells.

The third is an mRNA vaccine for a virus. It doesn't cause trouble or invade cells, because it is actually just a harmless bunch of proteins dressed up in a virus costume. Somehow the immune system recognizes that it is trouble and produces antibodies anyway. How? How does the immune system know what is a novel pathogen that needs destroying and what is harmless?

submitted by /u/BobTheAverage
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How accurate is this testimony by this surgeon? Is everyone who’s getting covid-19 ending up with smoker’s lungs or worse?

Posted: 17 Jan 2021 01:41 AM PST

If the COVID-19 vaccine isn’t a “live vaccine”, why do some people get sick after recieving it?

Posted: 17 Jan 2021 03:03 AM PST

I know several people who work in hospital settings and who have recieved the full vaccine already. On several occasions, they experienced covid-19 related symptoms (body aches, fever, nausea,etc) after the second dose. And while these symptoms clear within 24-48 hours, I have been wondering why it happens at all if the vaccine is not a live vaccine.

Could someone please kindly explain?

submitted by /u/needynikii
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Does COVID spread differently in humid indoor environments? (Like swimming pools?)

Posted: 16 Jan 2021 05:42 PM PST

Why is the measles vaccine so incredibly effective?

Posted: 16 Jan 2021 09:05 PM PST

How does a single core processor schedule work?

Posted: 16 Jan 2021 04:40 PM PST

In the old days when we only had single core processors, how would a processor schedule a task and then know to go back to windows scheduler (or OS of choice) and get another task?

Did it have some small cache of code that told it once it was done doing a task to go back to windows scheduler and compute a new one?

How did a single core know how to jump around so quickly from task to task to give the appearance of "multiple programs running simultaneiously" even though the precessor could only compute one task at a time.

I guess I don't understand how it could know to say, do a math problem for one program, then know what task to do next. If windows scheduler was a program in itself, how does a processor know to do a task and then not just "forget" windows scheduler if technically while it was working on another task, it couldn't be running scheduler at the exact same time to tell it what comes next.

submitted by /u/DieMadAboutIt
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Which type of cells does the Oxford-AstraZeneca's COVID-19 vaccine infects and causes expression of Sars-CoV-2's spike protein from? Is it the muscle cells or some other cells?

Posted: 16 Jan 2021 01:54 PM PST

Does exposure to larger amount of COVID-19 particles increase chance of getting sick in vaccinated people?

Posted: 16 Jan 2021 10:59 PM PST

I read that the severity of COVID-19 is depending by multiple factors, and among others there is the amount of COVID-19 virus particles that entered the body.

If the person got properly vaccinated and develops the proper antibodies, are they equally safe if in the single casual contact with the 1 person with the virus and in the room fill with 50 COVID-19 positive people talking and spreading the virus? What happens with the antibodies if there is like A LOT of virus coming in?

Thanks!

submitted by /u/ach_rus
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How does an atomic nucleus "know" about time?

Posted: 16 Jan 2021 10:52 AM PST

Radioactive atoms have a half life, which I understand is the time that it takes half of a sample of them to decay. I understand this is a random process; but it's also not completely random, since the half life is different for different elements. In other words, a U-238 nucleus "knows" to randomly split on a different time scale (or differently-skewed randomness) than Pu-240. That seems to imply to me that both nuclei have some sort of internal ticker that effectively says, "okay, time to roll the die to see if we should decay" at some level. (Even if the atom is constantly checking to see if it should decay at every moment, it still implies that moments are distinct; so I think it works out to the same question.) So, what's that ticker?

I think this may be the same as wondering why there's a half life at all: why doesn't every nucleus either instantly or never decay? The fact that it takes some time suggests that there's a measure of time within the nucleus.

submitted by /u/yshavit
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I’ve been looking everywhere for this research and it seems no one has any answers. Are there any predicted or assumed negative interactions with the new covid-19 vaccine and illicit drugs?

Posted: 16 Jan 2021 08:30 AM PST

Are there any species of animals that exist today that did not exist 100 or 200 years ago?

Posted: 16 Jan 2021 05:43 AM PST

I know we discover new species all the time. But are there species that exist today that actually did not exist in the recent past (say, 200 years)?

submitted by /u/its_nice_outside
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Will any of the new Covid vaccines cause scarring? What is it about certain vaccines (like the TB vaccine) that cause scarring?

Posted: 16 Jan 2021 08:20 AM PST

Quite curious as to whether any of the new covid vaccines will cause a scar in the part of the arm they were administered? A majority of my generation (millennial) can be identified by the TB Jab scar that they have in the upper middle of their non-dominant arm, something I found out recently that the new version of the TB vaccine does not do.

Will any of the new covid vaccines scar in the same way? What is it that causes certain vaccines, like the old version of the TB jab, to scar in this way? How is it that newer versions of vaccines that used to scar, no longer do?

Thanks for any answers!

(This is NOT some kind of antivax post or me trying to find reasons to avoid jabs. I am genuinely curious and am PRO vaccines)

submitted by /u/cherrycokeking
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What causes some vaccines to hurt more than others?

Posted: 16 Jan 2021 10:15 AM PST

I received several vaccines this week and some I barely felt-just the pinch of the needles- at all while others definitely caused some pain/stinging. What makes some have this effect and others not?

submitted by /u/brielle7599
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When a person is not ovulating (due to amenorrhea or birth control), what happens to those eggs?

Posted: 15 Jan 2021 09:06 PM PST

Are the eggs that would normally be released destroyed in some way, or are they retained? If they are retained, does this mean that someone who didn't ovulate for a year would have an additional year of fertility later on?

submitted by /u/amydiddler
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Why do new vaccines have to be tested? Can scientists not just use "template" vaccines and modify the strain?

Posted: 15 Jan 2021 10:12 PM PST

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