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Text 1 The influenza season is just getting started in the United States,and it already promises to be more severe than usual.Hospital emergency rooms are filling up with flu sufferers,and pharmacies have reported medicine shortages.Twelve children had died as of last month.To make matters worse,in Australia,which experienced its flu season four to six months ago,the current vaccine appeared to be only about 10 percent effective against tlus year"s dominant strain.Yet as bad as this winter"s epidemic is,it won"t compare with the flu pandemic that is almost certainly on the horizon if we don"t dedicate energy and resources to a universal vaccine.The 1918 Spanish flu epidemic killed 50 million t0 100 million around the globe.Given the century of medical progress since then,one might conclude that we are far better prepared today to deal with such a worldwide catastrophe.Unfortunately,the opposite is true.The world has about four times the number of inhabitants it did in 1918,including hundreds of millions of people,poultry and pigs living close together.This provides a potent biologic mixing bowl and natural influenza virus mutation factory.When a pandemic does strike,we"ll be in trouble in part because American hospitals and pharruacies keep in stock no more than a few days supply of most lifesaving drugs,almost all of which are made in Asia.Worldwide manufacturing and shipping are highly susceptible to disruption,which could mean shortages in many areas.A 1918-type influenza pandemic could cause ruin on the order of what the Black Death did t0 14th-century Europe,but on a global scale.Our current vaccines are based on 1940s research.Limited global manufacturing capacity combined with the five to six months it takes to make these vaccines mean many people would never even have a chance to be vaccinated.Little is being done to aggressively change this unacceptable situation.We will have worldwide flu pandemics.Only their severity is unknown.The only real solution is a universal vaccine that effectively attacks all influenza A strains,with reliable protection lasting for years,like other modem vaccines.Although the National Institutes of Health has publicly declared developing a vaccine a priority,it has only about$32 million this year specifically for such research.The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority,the other federal agency responsible for developing and making available new vaccines for emergency response,has in fiscal year 2017 0nly a single project for$43 million supporting game-changing infiuenza vaccines.By contrast,the search for an H.I,V.vaccine-still a scientific long shot-receives Sl billion annually.We estimate that intemational govemments,vaccine manufacturers and the philanthropic community must make a similar commitment to influenza vaccine research if the kind of vaccine we need is to developed in the next 10 years.But there is no apparent effort to make these vaccines a priority in the current administration 21.The urgent task on hand is to