@Shadowman311 Imagine trying to give a name for every variant of the flu. Several come out every year. That's what they're doing here, except they're doing it with more fanfare than they do for flu variants.
With flu variants, they typically give them alphanumeric combinations rather than names because there are so fucking many of them. Medical researchers do study flu variants for various reasons, like to try to create flu shots each year that work well enough. They speculate about what the flu will look like this year and make a bunch of variant vaccines hoping their guesses are correct. Another reason to study flu variants is to try to observe their migration patterns. Guess where they all start? Southeast Asia.
What's worth noting is there isn't as much drama about this as there is for COVID. In the case of the latter, there's a lot of fear mongering going on. Flu shots are considered optional, and the only argument to get them is so that you don't miss a few days of work. People don't act like you're killing Grandma by skipping the flu shot, which hilariously makes me more inclined to get it.
Honestly, if Pfizer and all these other companies didn't create this massive fear campaign and try to pressure me into taking it I might have just gotten it: "hey, we've got this experimental new mRNA vaccine technique for coronachan. Getting the flu sucks! Skip that noise for just $20 at Walgreens. We'll come out with another one in a year when it inevitably mutates"
That honestly sounds like a fair enough deal, sign me up. Instead of being calm and sane about it they lit their own hair on fire. Like I said, were in not for that I think "anti-vaxers" would still look crazy and not, like, the adults in the room