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It was the middle of the night, and my husband and I were taking turns trying to soothe our inconsolable 1-year-old. When the vomiting began, I remember thinking: So it’s come for us. A group chat of parents in our day care had warned that a stomach bug was spreading. The messages promised it would be brief and brutal.
Within hours, I was hunched over the toilet. By late afternoon, one of our weekend guests had also succumbed. Then came a text from my cousin, who, along with her husband, had babysat my son recently: “It happened last night.” They had both been hit; one of them slept in the bathtub.
Norovirus outbreaks are rising across the United States; it is impressively contagious: The virus spreads rapidly, symptoms appear suddenly and the virus can survive on surfaces for days to weeks. Each year, norovirus causes an estimated 19 million to 21 million illnesses in the United States alone. Despite its havoc there’s no vaccine. We need one.
Developing a vaccine is in part a scientific challenge. Norovirus has been notoriously difficult to study in the lab. To get a sufficient amount of virus to assess, researchers traditionally relied on a tricky process that used stool samples from sick patients to infect volunteers.
Then, in 2016, Mary Estes, a virologist currently at Baylor College of Medicine, figured out a way to create a human gut in a petri dish. She used stem cells to grow gut tissue in cultures known as organoids and added human bile to the cultures to get certain virus strains to replicate. These mini-gut cultures allow scientists to grow different norovirus strains in the laboratory, without making people sick.
But other hurdles remain. It’s unclear how many strains of norovirus a vaccine needs to target or which strains might appear in a given testing location. Funding and research have justifiably focused so far on diseases with higher rates of hospitalization and death. Norovirus has been “a little lower on the list,” said Estes.
That may be changing. There are vaccines for norovirus under study. One vaccine by the biotech company HilleVax failed in 2024 to prove its effectiveness in a clinical trial of infants. “I am sort of devastated,” said Estes, who did some of the early research behind the vaccine.
An mRNA vaccine developed by Moderna for norovirus recently began human clinical trials. I hope it succeeds. What better way to remind people of the power of vaccines than to eliminate the misery of puking?
The urgency I feel for a norovirus vaccine is itself a testament to the progress society has made. We knew that with day care could come seemingly endless illness, but even one of the scariest diseases currently prevalent among young children, respiratory syncytial virus, or R.S.V., now has a vaccine. If the biggest health threat my family faces this winter is a stomach bug, it’s because diseases that once killed or disabled children in the United States are now part of a not-so-distant past.
Let’s go further. Children’s lives may not depend on it, but parents’ sanity might.
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