Review by junkmail-385

The first few minutes start out well, but the series quickly devolves into a sludgy mess that is tedious and sparse with information. I'm also not a fan of crowd funding vaccine development or the pandering to the audience for donations that the director allowed into the film. The general public knows next to nothing about vaccines and vaccine development and would have basically no oversight authority over how their money would be used in such a case. The naive might think that because the Gates Foundation bought into the effort that that should be enough, but the Gates will only look at how its funds are spent. Glanville states, "From an outsider, it's not always obvious that we've achieved a victory." IMHO the data seem clear that "3 (shots) + high dose boost" of his candidate vaccine is at best on par with the effectiveness of a *single* shot of the established, fully vetted commercial vaccine that is known to be safe and protective. While this validates Glanville's method to a small degree by showing in vitro binding activity, it's far from showing the sort of success that was promoted to the audience: a single shot that would be safe and broadly protective against infection by a wide variety of influenza serotypes. As Glanville's vaccine was never tested for safety and effectiveness in actual infected pigs, for all we know his candidate vaccine could produce worse outcomes and more fatalities. We don't have a vaccine to the original SARS coronavirus because vaccinated animals suffered worse outcomes (including more fatalities) than those that were unvaccinated. (Candidate SARS2 vaccines from a myriad of companies and using many approaches are still being evaluated for safety and effectiveness upon actual infection in phase III human trials.) Glanville's hope of finding a broad spectrum vaccine might even be extremely dangerous if a flu strain would arise that doesn't fit in the model. We might one day wind up with a greatly enhanced fatality rate in those who were vaccinated. The safest and sanest approach might well be to continue development of targeted vaccines but with a majorly accelerated, yet safe, development schedule.