What do you mean, vaccines take forever? I get a flu shot every year!

Actually, you get a vaccine every year for last year's flu. Lemme explain.

Flu season is in the fall and winter, and after that a bunch of folks at WHO pick out the three most popular flu strains. They figure that next year, the most popular strains will be related to these ones. Then they start making vaccines from these strains. This involves incubating the virus in chicken eggs, removing the virus, killing it, and combining it with the other two strains to form the vaccine you get. The whole process finishes just in time to start distributing it for flu season the next year. Yes, it really takes 4-7 months to make a vaccine!

There's a lot of problems with making a vaccine for the bird flu, too. The seasonal flu isn't much like bird flu, so the seasonal vaccine won't give you immunity to bird flu. The companies that make the vaccine can't make enough to vaccinate the whole world. They definitely can't do it in a hurry - it's a pretty specialized process, and you can't speed it up. There's also a really basic problem: you can't create a vaccine for a disease that doesn't exist yet. Until there's a pandemic, there will be no pandemic vaccine.