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The pandemic's dramatic reducuction of ordinary flu could decrease effectivess of future flu vaccines
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Precautions aimed at tamping down the coronavirus helped nearly eradicate last year’s flu season — but that could backfire by making it harder to develop effective vaccines for next winter’s flu.
The hospitalization rate for the 2020-21 flu season was just 0.7 per 100,000 people, the lowest it’s been since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began collecting such data in 2005. Measures such as social distancing, wearing masks and staying indoors likely helped hold pediatric flu deaths to just one last flu season, compared to 196 in the 2019-20 season.
Public health experts are relieved that the United States avoided a “twindemic” of a strong flu season amid a spiraling Covid-19 outbreak. But the low levels of flu have left experts with a much smaller pool of data used for predicting which flu strains will predominate next winter — raising the odds that the 2021-22 flu vaccine will be less effective than normal.
Once doors start opening again and people venture out without taking a year’s worth of Covid-19 precautions, it’s possible there could be new strains of the flu circulating that scientists didn't anticipate, said Cody Meissner, an infectious disease specialist and pediatrician at Tufts Children’s Hospital who also serves on the FDA vaccine advisory panel. Without a strong enough vaccine, the pandemic-weary country could experience a severe flu season just as it emerges from fighting the coronavirus.
“We may have a combination of low public health measures at the population level with a low effectiveness vaccine. And then so you might have a raging flu season next year,” said Lawrence Gostin, a global health law professor at Georgetown University.
Concerns about the knock-on effects of the shockingly quiet flu season came to the fore earlier this month at a meeting of the Food and Drug Administration’s independent vaccine advisory committee. While experts suggested there are lessons to be learned from last year’s flu season that could help prevent high flu rates in future years, they also struggled to project what next winter could bring. ...
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