> But it doesn't make a lot of sense to me since influenza will be mutating to escape the immune response.

unless there is sufficient number of people that take it and it works well enough to eradicate it like say polio was.

Given the anti-vaccine resurgence, I think it is unlikely for the flu vaccine update to reach that sort of critical mass.

Especially now that governments don’t want to aid people financially that got harmed by the vaccines, since getting a vaccine was voluntarily [0].

It’s not like governments stated that the vaccines are both safe and effective and indirectly put pressure on people to get the vaccine, after all.

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[0]: https://www-geenstijl-nl.translate.goog/5170466/ja-ja/?_x_tr...

Flu commonly comes from animal carriers, such as birds and swine, so I'm not sure if wiping it from humans will ever eradicate the disease.

Polio wasn't eradicated.

>But it doesn't make a lot of sense to me since influenza will be mutating to escape the immune response

Not all mutations are equal; the flu has antigenic factors that rapidly change in response to evolutionary pressure that don't significantly affect the fitness of the virus. If you're able to target another element of the virus that is conserved, or target a large segment of the possible antigenic conformations in a single vaccine, you'd force immune evasion mutations to significantly lower the virus's fitness, which is a very big deal.

The 18 variations are like a deck of 18 cards, the virus 'shuffles' one into use, next year another works better. The multivalent vaccine is for all 18 cards, evolutionary escape is far less likely, if not impossible.