 During World War II, Burnet's research moved to influenza and scrub typhus. With the outbreak of war, Burnet was handed more responsibility and made acting director and had to oversee the move into a new building as Kellaway was seconded to the military in 1939. Due to Kellaway, many of the infectious disease problems afflicting the military were referred to the institute. Fearing a repeat of the massive global influenza outbreak that occurred after World War I, Burnet focused the institute in the search for a vaccine. He first tested the vaccine on a group of medical students, and after a promising test on 107 army volunteers in February 1942 following a rise in infections, a large-scale program was introduced two months later to inoculate all new recruits after an influenza A outbreak. In this trial, 20,000 personnel were vaccinated, without success, and the scheme was abandoned. In 1942, the investigations into scrub typhus accelerated after an exodus of researchers in that field from Malaya after the Japanese conquest of the area. However, this ended in tragedy when his collaborator Dora Lush accidentally injected herself and then died of the infection. Nevertheless, his work on immunisation had earned him international recognition by this time.
