US bets $500 million on universal vaccines, WSJ reports

The United States is investing $500 million in a vaccine project, with the goal of making "universal" vaccines that protect against multiple strains of a virus at once, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, citing emails.

The project involves producing vaccines from chemically inactivated whole viruses, reminiscent of how flu vaccines were made decades ago, WSJ said.

The move is part of what the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) calls 'Generation Gold Standard', a universal-vaccine technology that represents a shift in funding from COVID-19 projects to studies of more viruses, the paper reported.


The project also includes research on a second universal flu vaccine and universal coronavirus vaccines, according to a HHS statement to the WSJ. U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr would require all new vaccines to undergo placebo testing, The Washington Post reported late Wednesday. Kennedy, a former environmental lawyer, is well known as a vaccine sceptic and founded the anti-vaccine group Children's Health Defense, which has sued in state and federal courts over common inoculations, including measles.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately reply to a Reuters request for comment.