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When manufacturers produce each year’s stock of vaccines, they either grow the virus in animal cells or in fertilized chicken eggs. Part of the problem in recent years, the virus has mutated when introduced into the chicken eggs.

“We pick a strain that we think is going to be well-matched, but when that virus goes into eggs, it changes a bit,” explained Webby. But that doesn’t mean that we should give up on eggs, which have long been the mainstay for flu vaccine production, Webby said, nothing that instead, we should diversify our vaccine portfolio.

\"PHOTO:
Sarah Silbiger/Reuters
PHOTO: President Donald Trump walks across the South Lawn of the White House, Sept. 16, 2019.
>

Dr. Peter Hotez, professor and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, told ABC News that while he appreciated the president highlighting \"one of our greatest infectious disease threats,” he didn’t understand why flu vaccine development and innovation had been so sluggish.

It’s also not clear how Trump’s task force advances the flu vaccine efforts made by previous administrations, experts said. Past presidents had similarly prioritized and allocated funding for vaccines, including $91 million in 2013 to GlaxoSmithKline and the Texas A&M University System, to develop flu vaccine manufacturing facility.

Still, Hotez acknowledged barriers to rapid innovation. “The profit margin for flu vaccinations is not high,” he said. “It requires quite a lot of upfront investment to completely re-do an age-old manufacturing process.”

He also stressed the value in a national push to develop what he called the dream vaccine, a universal flu vaccine Americans could receive once and be protected in future years, instead of returning year after year for immunization against the latest virus.

\"Why are we still tethered to 20th-century technology?”

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