The funding, which follows the $176 million the government awarded Moderna in June 2024, aims to get mRNA vaccines ready before bird flu strains currently circulating in the wild and on farms can potentially cause human outbreaks.
Health and Human Services (HHS) announced on Friday that it was giving approximately $590 million to Moderna to produce mRNA-based vaccines against bird flu and other influenza strains with pandemic potential.
The money comes from HHS’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA).
The goal of the funding is to get ahead of H5N1 avian influenza strains currently circulating in wild birds, poultry, and cows, with occasional and sporadic human infections, mostly in farm workers. H5N1 has killed millions of wild birds over the last few years, though there are currently no known cases of human-to-human transmission and the CDC considers the current public health risk of H5 avian flu strains to be low.
This award comes on top of $176 million that BARDA awarded Moderna in June 2024 to goose its production of mRNA vaccines for H5 and H7 avian flu viruses. That work has, according to Moderna, already produced positive data in initial Phase I/II studies.
“Avian flu variants have proven to be particularly unpredictable and dangerous to humans in the past. That is why this response has been a top priority for the Biden-Harris Administration and HHS,” said HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra in a statement. “Accelerating the development of new vaccines will allow us to stay ahead and ensure that Americans have the tools they need to stay safe.”
HHS’s funding will go toward Moderna developing an mRNA vaccine and a Phase III trial for H7N9 bird flu, another subtype commonly found in birds, as well as four additional “novel pandemic influenza vaccines,” without specifying what those strains were. H7N9 is similarly slow to cross over into humans, although an outbreak in China between 2013 and 2019 caused about 1,500 human cases and about 600 deaths.
