Throughout the United States, prized chickens are laying everyday living-saving eggs at magic formula farms.

Handful of persons know wherever the chickens are kept — their spots are undisclosed as a subject of nationwide safety.

Each working day, hundreds of 1000’s of their eggs are trucked to storage services, where they are guarded by guards and multimillion-dollar, federal government-funded security programs.

But these eggs are not for breakfast they are the resource of your frequent flu shot.

For the earlier 80 many years, considerably of the planet has relied on rooster eggs for the production of influenza vaccines.

About 174.5 million doses of the flu vaccine were distributed throughout the US this flu year via the end of February, of which an believed 82% had been egg-based mostly, in accordance to the Centers for Disorder Handle and Avoidance (CDC).

With each individual egg producing 1 vaccine, that means the US could have used 140 million eggs this flu period by yourself.

To get ready for once-a-year flu seasons, as very well as achievable pandemics, the US federal government has invested tens or hundreds of thousands and thousands of pounds in excess of the previous 15 yrs to assure there are ample eggs for vaccines.

But now the globe faces a new disaster: the novel coronavirus, which has contaminated extra than 423,000 folks globally and killed extra than 19,000 due to the fact the virus emerged last December, according to Johns Hopkins University.

There is no vaccine nonetheless for the virus and simply because it is really various than the influenza virus, traditional approaches like employing eggs would not get the job done. As researchers race to uncover a get rid of, the substantial US stockpile of eggs will never be of any assistance.

Read a lot more below.