"Many challenges remain to improving influenza vaccines. Current seasonal influenza vaccines, at best, are only moderately effective in preventing illness and often have low effectiveness. Greater monitoring of vaccine effectiveness is needed to better inform incremental improvements in current influenza vaccines. A more broadly protective and longer-lasting (i.e., “universal”) vaccine could decrease the current need for frequent formulation change and improve prevention of influenza worldwide, especially in low-resource and middle-income countries. Rapid development of vaccine candidates, accelerated clinical trials, and reducing the time required to formulate and distribute pandemic vaccine can reduce pandemic morbidity and deaths. Therefore, reducing the current pandemic influenza vaccine availability timeframe from 20 to 12 weeks is a key priority in the 2017 Update of the Health and Human Services Pandemic Influenza Plan."