Col#265- 11/24/25
PREPARE FOR A DIFFICULT FLU SEASON
By
Richard Davis
Every year strains of influenza spread around the world. In the United States we look to the southern hemisphere and the U.K. to get an indication of what might head our way.
Drug manufacturers develop vaccines based on their best information, which is partly guesswork, and hope they come close to identifying the strain of flu we will face.
The 2025-26 U.S. flu season may be bad this year because the vaccines that were created are not a good match for the strain of flu that we will experience. According to a recent report on NPR, “And now, parts of the Northern Hemisphere, such as the United Kingdom, are being hit hard. That often foreshadows what’s in store for the U.S.
Another clue is the Northern Hemisphere’s dominant flu strain so far. It’s an H3N2 flu virus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention flu tracker. And H3N2 viruses “tend to be a little bit more problematic,” Webby says. “When we have an H3N2 season, we tend to have a little bit more activity, a little bit more disease at the severe end of the spectrum.
They go on to note that, “The last major flu season dominated by H3N2 was 2016-2017. In addition, a new H3N2 variant recently evolved and has become the dominant strain in the U.S. “There is basically a new variant of influenza circulating that has mutated a little bit,” says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins. “And that means that it’s just different enough from what your body or the vaccine may recognize that it can kind of get around those protections.” And she says the flu shot this year “may not be as good a match as if we hadn’t seen this new variant.”
If the experience in the U.K. reflects what we may expect in the U.S., the currently developed vaccine is 70% to 75% protective against hospitalization in children and about 30% to 40% protective against hospitalization in adults. Those numbers are low, but the vaccine is still protective and could make the difference between mild and serious illness. People who are already frail and vulnerable could die without the vaccine this year.
Too many people, especially those who have never had the flu, think it is just a bad cold.
That is not the case. The flu is a potentially deadly illness that causes a great deal of morbidity and mortality around the world. The flu kills between 12,000- 52,000 people in the U.S. every year.
In this country we also have a new disease that may make this flu season worse than it needs to be. That is the Robert Kennedy Jr. disease of ignorance and vaccine misinformation. Thousands of people will forego getting vaccinated against the flu and other diseases because they believe the non-scientific garbage that Kennedy is throwing out.
People 65 years and older tend to have vaccination rates above 70%, but those numbers drop a lot for younger people to around 35%-49%. It is impossible to know how much of the Kennedy effect will cause people to suffer and die when they get the flu this year, but even one death is significant. Kennedy has changed the language on the CDC web site to make the agency less supportive of vaccination.
The more people who get vaccinated against the flu the less likely it will spread. That is a scientific fact. Scientists hope for an 80% vaccination rate, but that is unlikely, and that means that more people will needlessly suffer and die. Instead of doing his job to protect the American people Kennedy is sowing doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. We need to refute his deadly perspective as much as we can.
