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The other challenge of a flu vaccine is getting people to take it. This past year, just over half the population received a flu vaccination [0]. But maybe a mo

The other challenge of a flu vaccine is getting people to take it. This past year, just over half the population received a flu vaccination [0]. But maybe a more effective vaccine would be more appealing, so this vaccine might also address that part of the problem. It’s unclear whether from the part of this article not paywalled, but if it eliminates the need for annual shots, that would also help, too. [0]: https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/flu-vaccination-rate/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/flu-vaccination-ra...

epicureanideal 4y ago
All vaccines have small risks. I’ve had family members get lifelong painful complications from I think two different vaccines, neither related to the recent ones. So it makes me a little hesitant when I know that I’ll survive the flu like I have many times before.
- namdnay 4y ago
  That’s the thing isn’t it? Is the risk of the vaccine higher than the risk of a future flu? I strongly suspect it isn’t
  - watwut 4y ago
    In my case, I had actual flue exactly once in my life. It was super unpleasant, but no big deal and ended in exactly one week. I got flu shot three times and got sick with (not flu ordinary sickness) right after three times and it took two weeks to feel good after. I guess the issue is that I am rarely entirely healthy during cold season and flu shot pushes me over the line. Not really work it. I would take it if I had reason to - like a relative with super weak immune system or had to go to hospital whatever. But other then that, it is not worth it.
  - toast0 4y ago
    At least for me, the first several times I got the flu shot, I had a fairly strong immune response; this is probably good, but still two to three days of disruption. The last couple shots haven't been so bad (or I also had a covid shot at the same time, so who knows). But after the first two flu shots it was: known couple of days feeling sick plus very low chance of major complication vs unlikely several days of feeling sick plys low chance of major complication ... and there's a decent chance of getting the shot, feeling sick, and then getting the flu and feeling sick again. Now that I've gotten the shot enough times that I don't have a strong response, it's easier to just get it. The very low chance of major complications with no family history of such isn't enough for me to worry about. But the US has different policies on this intervention than other countries, so reasonable people can differ, I guess.
- olddustytrail 4y ago
  All flu have big risks. What makes you think you'll survive the next one?
  - ithkuil 4y ago
    Because he survived the past ones and because of a anecdote of close person showcasing a vaccine risk materializing. Humans are not well equiped with intuition about objrctive risk assesment
    - ThunderSizzle 4y ago
      What is objective in this case? The CDC records the statistics for adverse affects, vaccine effectiveness, etc., but they also have a financial and political incentive for these stats to look good. If you use their numbers for objectivity, it's already inherently subjective based on the way they record metrics, and the metrics they focused on. I saw this very plainly with Covid case metrics.
      - azinman2 4y ago
        What makes you say they have financial and political incentives? They get funded whether you get the flu or not, so that seems very hard to believe. They also aren’t tied to a standing in their ability to prevent the flu, so what would be the political risk? And that’s even assuming the scientists behind it could be swayed by politics in reporting of stats. Big claims require big evidence.
        politician 4y ago
        I'm not advocating for either position in this thread, but surely you watched the CDC switch from one policy position to another dramatically different position multiple times during 2021. They made decisions and rewrote those decisions within 24 hours due to political blowback not just once, but multiple times. They might do good science, but they lost any trust I had in their ability to set and execute a coherent national policy.
- nabakin 4y ago
  A friend's sense of taste has been permanently changed/damaged after he was hit with the full force of covid and he's young. It's not worth it.
  - grugagag 4y ago
    Wow, is it really permanent? I thought most people get it back eventually. I lost and recovered mine after covid
    - scotty79 4y ago
      Hard to tell if something is permanent. But the fact remains that some people didn't get their senses back yet despite getting first infected with covid years ago.
      - grugagag 4y ago
        I wasn’t aware it’s long lasting to permanent. That’s an awful way to go through life without smell or taste
    - jeromegv 4y ago
      My cousin got Covid before the vaccine was available. She has lost sense of taste since then. Everything tastes like metal. She’s now lost so much weight and missing lots of nutriments because it’s just really hard for her to eat when everything tastes awful.
      - nabakin 4y ago
        Yeah that's exactly the situation with my friend too
    - nabakin 4y ago
      As of a month ago, my friend's taste hasn't recovered yet or started to and he got covid in 2020
- adastra22 4y ago
  You will survive the flu until you don’t. In my early 30’s I got deathly ill from the flu. Not an expression: I was delirious with a 104 fever for 4 days that would not go down even with medication, and probably should have been hospitalized. I’m lucky there was no long term effects. I always get my flu shot now.
  - grugagag 4y ago
    I got the flu shot after which, about a month later, I got a bad case of flu with symptoms similar to what you described above. Flu shots may help but they may also not…
    - azinman2 4y ago
      Then imagine if you hadn’t gotten it. There’s also the chance that you got a variant of that wasn’t protected, hence the value of this work.
      - moonchrome 4y ago
        > Then imagine if you hadn’t gotten it. This is nonsense - like you said in the second part - flu shots work on select strains - he could have a different one at which point the shot was useless. This argument (and similar) really sound like religious beliefs ("believe science"). From what I've seen - if you're 18-50 it's not worth getting.
        consp 4y ago
        > if you're 18-50 it's not worth getting. There are plenty of people for whom is VERY MUCH worth getting in those age categories. Don't generalize with health.
        moonchrome 4y ago
        True, should have said healthy in that age group.
devmor 4y ago
I kept putting mine off this year and just forgot about it. I think that happens to a lot of people too - rather than just outright refusal. It's one of those things you need to make time for and just don't prioritize unless you're extremely worried about it.
- actuallyalys 4y ago
  Yes, I think this is part of it. I’ve certainly forgotten to get the flu vaccine in the past. Having vaccination programs in workplaces and other places people visit often can probably help with that. Pharmacies have begun to offer flu vaccines in the past 10 years or so, which is great. Making all vaccines free to the recipient would also make the choice simpler.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    I get paid (by my insurance) $100 to get flu shot, and $200 to get an annual wellness exam, and $100 for an A1C test, and $100 for a cholesterol test every year. So I get at least $500 for spending 30min to go to a doctor every year, which is all the incentive I need to remember to schedule it (as simple as putting a yearly reminder in my calendar).
  - tssva 4y ago
    My employer has nurses on staff which used to give the flu vaccine. Now that more people are remote and every Walgreens, CVS, Walmart and grocery store with a pharmacy gives them with no charge to those with insurance they have stopped giving it at work. It was convenient to just take the elevator a couple of floors and get the vaccine during lunch. They self-insure so it not only reduced time taken because of illness but reduced their insurance costs.
jimbob45 4y ago
It doesn't help that most people don't know that the common cold and the flu are two entirely separate illnesses. Even if they know they're separate, they usually think they're roughly equivalent, which they're certainly not.
gus_massa 4y ago
50% of everyone older than 6 months is a lot. Here in Argentina the flu vaccine is only recommended for: * Children between 6 months and 2 years * People with more than 65 yea old * Pregnant women * Special cases, like other chronic illness It's free for these groups. Other people can get it too paying a small fee.
- mlyle 4y ago
  There's a small amount of epidemiological study that implies that you save more of the very old and very young from the flu by vaccinating school age children (age 5 to 12) children. It makes sense-- they're a primary transmission vector, and they mount a more robust response to the flu vaccine than toddlers and elderly.
  - eftychis 4y ago
    There were similar guidelines approaches for COVID but political pressure dictated otherwise.
- eftychis 4y ago
  Yeah the problem with vaccines is: either everyone takes them or they don't work how people think they do.
  - gus_massa 4y ago
    Each vaccine protect the person that takes them from the illness, sometimes making it not dangerous, sometimes blocking it completely. They are effective for you even if only you take it. Herd immunity is only a nice side effect when you have enough vaccinated people and the vaccine is good enough to stop the spread.
BurningFrog 4y ago
The point of a universal vaccine is that you don't have to take it every year, since it protects against all variants.
- azinman2 4y ago
  I think we need to see how long the protection lasts. Many vaccines need boosters after some period of time.
  - BurningFrog 4y ago
    Agreed!
- lamontcg 4y ago
  The point of a universal vaccine is that when something like H5N1 jumps species from birds to humans that the antibodies to the hemagglutinin stem will work across all influenza A viruses. The word "subtypes" in the title is much broader than variants. And it may not prevent infection but it could take some 1918-like novel influenza pandemic that would be 10x more lethal than the coronavirus pandemic we just suffered and turn it into the 2009 H1N1 pandemic (for everyone who bothered to get vaccinated anyway).
User23 4y ago
The problem with the flu vaccine, just like the covid vaccine, is that it just doesn’t work very well. I’m confident that a sterilizing flu vaccine that worked as well as MMR, Tdap, polio, chickenpox, and various others would have considerably higher uptake than the semi-effective mostly palliative shots on the market today.
- vidarh 4y ago
  The biggest problem with the flu vaccine is that there is no "the" flu vaccine. Each year there are attempts at predicting the prevalent strains that year and producing a multivalent vaccine targeting the most likely strains. Some years the prediction is spot on, some it misses badly. That is exactly what this attempt at a very broad coverage is attempting to change. The second problem is that this process makes it hard to build up stockpiles to actually provide vaccines to everyone, and so there's little incentive for any broad pushes to increase update outside of specific groups of people. If this attempt succeeds at getting coverage for a vaccine that can stay the same for longer periods, then expect to see attempts to distribute it more broadly and maybe even attempts to eradicate some of the strains.
whateveracct 4y ago
My in-laws refuse to get a flu shot. On top of refusing to get Covid boosted despite only having the J&J. They say they don't need it because they have good immune systems and never get sick. Combined with living in a red state and general internet nonsense causing them to not trust doctors anymore.
- Firmwarrior 4y ago
  Hey, I can't seem to get a straight answer to this question, I've been asking doctors for over a decade though If everyone takes the flu vaccine and wipes out that strain for the season, won't we just get a different strain of flu circulating for the year?
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    I am not a doctor, but my lay understanding is that this is ones of the reasons why we have multivalent vaccines. "Let the perfect not be the enemy of the good," etc.
  - vidarh 4y ago
    If we do, that'd be good news because it'd mean possibility for consistently getting a better match with still extant strains by the vaccines (each year there are efforts to pick which strains to protect against based on prevalence, any reduction in strains improves odds) and/or might make it viable to produce and distribute a larger number of simpler vaccines ("First, returning to vaccines with two IAV strains and a B/Victoria strain could increase the available doses for global distribution (from ~500 million QIV doses to ~700 million doses of a trivalent vaccine9)" [3]). Note that there's a possibility that a couple of flu strains may have gone extinct due to reduced transmission during covid [1] [2] [3], so we have a chance at getting direct data on this over the next few years if those strains don't make a reappearance. [1] https://www.livescience.com/flu-virus-types-extinct-covid-19.html https://www.livescience.com/flu-virus-types-extinct-covid-19... [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36177871/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36177871/ [3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-021-00642-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-021-00642-4
  - 4y ago
sergers 4y ago
I haven't had a flu shot consistently since 1994 in early elementary school and then randomly decided to get 1 in 2006 as my work was offering it That's it. Never had a the flu that I am aware of. I would definately be interested if a shot that covered all types, but not interested in taking something annually personally for a what seems a highly remote risk of infection so far never catching the flu (when even being around others with it). Is there any stats of people who had a flu shot but still got the flu? I hear it's always the case of oh it's a different strain spreading this season than the shot... Or majority of people who say they have the flu it's really not
DominikPeters 4y ago
It would be helpful for me if there was clearer public communication about how recommendable the flu vaccine is in any given year. It varies a lot because some years they've correctly guessed the circulating strains and in other years they haven't. I'm happier to get vaccinated in years where we can expect (a) the circulating strains to be bad and (b) the vaccine being effective against it.
- nradov 4y ago
  The flu vaccine is always expected to be effective. But actual effectiveness can only be calculated in retrospect. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/past-seasons-estimates.html https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/past-seasons-estimates...

epicureanideal 4y ago

All vaccines have small risks. I’ve had family members get lifelong painful complications from I think two different vaccines, neither related to the recent ones. So it makes me a little hesitant when I know that I’ll survive the flu like I have many times before.

namdnay 4y ago
That’s the thing isn’t it? Is the risk of the vaccine higher than the risk of a future flu? I strongly suspect it isn’t
- watwut 4y ago
  In my case, I had actual flue exactly once in my life. It was super unpleasant, but no big deal and ended in exactly one week. I got flu shot three times and got sick with (not flu ordinary sickness) right after three times and it took two weeks to feel good after. I guess the issue is that I am rarely entirely healthy during cold season and flu shot pushes me over the line. Not really work it. I would take it if I had reason to - like a relative with super weak immune system or had to go to hospital whatever. But other then that, it is not worth it.
- toast0 4y ago
  At least for me, the first several times I got the flu shot, I had a fairly strong immune response; this is probably good, but still two to three days of disruption. The last couple shots haven't been so bad (or I also had a covid shot at the same time, so who knows). But after the first two flu shots it was: known couple of days feeling sick plus very low chance of major complication vs unlikely several days of feeling sick plys low chance of major complication ... and there's a decent chance of getting the shot, feeling sick, and then getting the flu and feeling sick again. Now that I've gotten the shot enough times that I don't have a strong response, it's easier to just get it. The very low chance of major complications with no family history of such isn't enough for me to worry about. But the US has different policies on this intervention than other countries, so reasonable people can differ, I guess.
olddustytrail 4y ago
All flu have big risks. What makes you think you'll survive the next one?
- ithkuil 4y ago
  Because he survived the past ones and because of a anecdote of close person showcasing a vaccine risk materializing. Humans are not well equiped with intuition about objrctive risk assesment
  - ThunderSizzle 4y ago
    What is objective in this case? The CDC records the statistics for adverse affects, vaccine effectiveness, etc., but they also have a financial and political incentive for these stats to look good. If you use their numbers for objectivity, it's already inherently subjective based on the way they record metrics, and the metrics they focused on. I saw this very plainly with Covid case metrics.
    - azinman2 4y ago
      What makes you say they have financial and political incentives? They get funded whether you get the flu or not, so that seems very hard to believe. They also aren’t tied to a standing in their ability to prevent the flu, so what would be the political risk? And that’s even assuming the scientists behind it could be swayed by politics in reporting of stats. Big claims require big evidence.
      - politician 4y ago
        I'm not advocating for either position in this thread, but surely you watched the CDC switch from one policy position to another dramatically different position multiple times during 2021. They made decisions and rewrote those decisions within 24 hours due to political blowback not just once, but multiple times. They might do good science, but they lost any trust I had in their ability to set and execute a coherent national policy.
nabakin 4y ago
A friend's sense of taste has been permanently changed/damaged after he was hit with the full force of covid and he's young. It's not worth it.
- grugagag 4y ago
  Wow, is it really permanent? I thought most people get it back eventually. I lost and recovered mine after covid
  - scotty79 4y ago
    Hard to tell if something is permanent. But the fact remains that some people didn't get their senses back yet despite getting first infected with covid years ago.
    - grugagag 4y ago
      I wasn’t aware it’s long lasting to permanent. That’s an awful way to go through life without smell or taste
  - jeromegv 4y ago
    My cousin got Covid before the vaccine was available. She has lost sense of taste since then. Everything tastes like metal. She’s now lost so much weight and missing lots of nutriments because it’s just really hard for her to eat when everything tastes awful.
    - nabakin 4y ago
      Yeah that's exactly the situation with my friend too
  - nabakin 4y ago
    As of a month ago, my friend's taste hasn't recovered yet or started to and he got covid in 2020
adastra22 4y ago
You will survive the flu until you don’t. In my early 30’s I got deathly ill from the flu. Not an expression: I was delirious with a 104 fever for 4 days that would not go down even with medication, and probably should have been hospitalized. I’m lucky there was no long term effects. I always get my flu shot now.
- grugagag 4y ago
  I got the flu shot after which, about a month later, I got a bad case of flu with symptoms similar to what you described above. Flu shots may help but they may also not…
  - azinman2 4y ago
    Then imagine if you hadn’t gotten it. There’s also the chance that you got a variant of that wasn’t protected, hence the value of this work.
    - moonchrome 4y ago
      > Then imagine if you hadn’t gotten it. This is nonsense - like you said in the second part - flu shots work on select strains - he could have a different one at which point the shot was useless. This argument (and similar) really sound like religious beliefs ("believe science"). From what I've seen - if you're 18-50 it's not worth getting.
      - consp 4y ago
        > if you're 18-50 it's not worth getting. There are plenty of people for whom is VERY MUCH worth getting in those age categories. Don't generalize with health.
        moonchrome 4y ago
        True, should have said healthy in that age group.

devmor 4y ago

I kept putting mine off this year and just forgot about it. I think that happens to a lot of people too - rather than just outright refusal. It's one of those things you need to make time for and just don't prioritize unless you're extremely worried about it.

actuallyalys 4y ago
Yes, I think this is part of it. I’ve certainly forgotten to get the flu vaccine in the past. Having vaccination programs in workplaces and other places people visit often can probably help with that. Pharmacies have begun to offer flu vaccines in the past 10 years or so, which is great. Making all vaccines free to the recipient would also make the choice simpler.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  I get paid (by my insurance) $100 to get flu shot, and $200 to get an annual wellness exam, and $100 for an A1C test, and $100 for a cholesterol test every year. So I get at least $500 for spending 30min to go to a doctor every year, which is all the incentive I need to remember to schedule it (as simple as putting a yearly reminder in my calendar).
- tssva 4y ago
  My employer has nurses on staff which used to give the flu vaccine. Now that more people are remote and every Walgreens, CVS, Walmart and grocery store with a pharmacy gives them with no charge to those with insurance they have stopped giving it at work. It was convenient to just take the elevator a couple of floors and get the vaccine during lunch. They self-insure so it not only reduced time taken because of illness but reduced their insurance costs.

jimbob45 4y ago

It doesn't help that most people don't know that the common cold and the flu are two entirely separate illnesses. Even if they know they're separate, they usually think they're roughly equivalent, which they're certainly not.

gus_massa 4y ago

50% of everyone older than 6 months is a lot. Here in Argentina the flu vaccine is only recommended for: * Children between 6 months and 2 years * People with more than 65 yea old * Pregnant women * Special cases, like other chronic illness It's free for these groups. Other people can get it too paying a small fee.

mlyle 4y ago
There's a small amount of epidemiological study that implies that you save more of the very old and very young from the flu by vaccinating school age children (age 5 to 12) children. It makes sense-- they're a primary transmission vector, and they mount a more robust response to the flu vaccine than toddlers and elderly.
- eftychis 4y ago
  There were similar guidelines approaches for COVID but political pressure dictated otherwise.
eftychis 4y ago
Yeah the problem with vaccines is: either everyone takes them or they don't work how people think they do.
- gus_massa 4y ago
  Each vaccine protect the person that takes them from the illness, sometimes making it not dangerous, sometimes blocking it completely. They are effective for you even if only you take it. Herd immunity is only a nice side effect when you have enough vaccinated people and the vaccine is good enough to stop the spread.

BurningFrog 4y ago

The point of a universal vaccine is that you don't have to take it every year, since it protects against all variants.

azinman2 4y ago
I think we need to see how long the protection lasts. Many vaccines need boosters after some period of time.
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  Agreed!
lamontcg 4y ago
The point of a universal vaccine is that when something like H5N1 jumps species from birds to humans that the antibodies to the hemagglutinin stem will work across all influenza A viruses. The word "subtypes" in the title is much broader than variants. And it may not prevent infection but it could take some 1918-like novel influenza pandemic that would be 10x more lethal than the coronavirus pandemic we just suffered and turn it into the 2009 H1N1 pandemic (for everyone who bothered to get vaccinated anyway).

User23 4y ago

The problem with the flu vaccine, just like the covid vaccine, is that it just doesn’t work very well. I’m confident that a sterilizing flu vaccine that worked as well as MMR, Tdap, polio, chickenpox, and various others would have considerably higher uptake than the semi-effective mostly palliative shots on the market today.

vidarh 4y ago
The biggest problem with the flu vaccine is that there is no "the" flu vaccine. Each year there are attempts at predicting the prevalent strains that year and producing a multivalent vaccine targeting the most likely strains. Some years the prediction is spot on, some it misses badly. That is exactly what this attempt at a very broad coverage is attempting to change. The second problem is that this process makes it hard to build up stockpiles to actually provide vaccines to everyone, and so there's little incentive for any broad pushes to increase update outside of specific groups of people. If this attempt succeeds at getting coverage for a vaccine that can stay the same for longer periods, then expect to see attempts to distribute it more broadly and maybe even attempts to eradicate some of the strains.

whateveracct 4y ago

My in-laws refuse to get a flu shot. On top of refusing to get Covid boosted despite only having the J&J. They say they don't need it because they have good immune systems and never get sick. Combined with living in a red state and general internet nonsense causing them to not trust doctors anymore.

Firmwarrior 4y ago
Hey, I can't seem to get a straight answer to this question, I've been asking doctors for over a decade though If everyone takes the flu vaccine and wipes out that strain for the season, won't we just get a different strain of flu circulating for the year?
- woodruffw 4y ago
  I am not a doctor, but my lay understanding is that this is ones of the reasons why we have multivalent vaccines. "Let the perfect not be the enemy of the good," etc.
- vidarh 4y ago
  If we do, that'd be good news because it'd mean possibility for consistently getting a better match with still extant strains by the vaccines (each year there are efforts to pick which strains to protect against based on prevalence, any reduction in strains improves odds) and/or might make it viable to produce and distribute a larger number of simpler vaccines ("First, returning to vaccines with two IAV strains and a B/Victoria strain could increase the available doses for global distribution (from ~500 million QIV doses to ~700 million doses of a trivalent vaccine9)" [3]). Note that there's a possibility that a couple of flu strains may have gone extinct due to reduced transmission during covid [1] [2] [3], so we have a chance at getting direct data on this over the next few years if those strains don't make a reappearance. [1] https://www.livescience.com/flu-virus-types-extinct-covid-19.html https://www.livescience.com/flu-virus-types-extinct-covid-19... [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36177871/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36177871/ [3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-021-00642-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-021-00642-4
- 4y ago

sergers 4y ago

I haven't had a flu shot consistently since 1994 in early elementary school and then randomly decided to get 1 in 2006 as my work was offering it That's it. Never had a the flu that I am aware of. I would definately be interested if a shot that covered all types, but not interested in taking something annually personally for a what seems a highly remote risk of infection so far never catching the flu (when even being around others with it). Is there any stats of people who had a flu shot but still got the flu? I hear it's always the case of oh it's a different strain spreading this season than the shot... Or majority of people who say they have the flu it's really not

DominikPeters 4y ago

It would be helpful for me if there was clearer public communication about how recommendable the flu vaccine is in any given year. It varies a lot because some years they've correctly guessed the circulating strains and in other years they haven't. I'm happier to get vaccinated in years where we can expect (a) the circulating strains to be bad and (b) the vaccine being effective against it.

nradov 4y ago
The flu vaccine is always expected to be effective. But actual effectiveness can only be calculated in retrospect. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/past-seasons-estimates.html https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/past-seasons-estimates...