A world without flu is possible |
Let’s start with the bad news.
There’s a decent chance, perhaps as high as 11 percent if you’re unvaccinated, that some time over the course of this winter, you’ll be overcome with chills, followed by extreme fatigue, body aches and cough, and culminating in a sudden spike in fever. Congratulations: you have the flu.
Every winter in the US has its share of flu cases, but this season is shaping up to be particularly bad. Early this week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put the flu season in the “moderately severe” category, with an estimated 11 million illnesses, 120,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths so far. Here in New York, where I live, the city kicked off 2026 by setting records for flu-related hospitalizations.
While what we’re experiencing is not a “super flu,” it is a particularly bad one, thanks in part to the emergence of a subgroup of the well-established H3N2 flu virus called subclade K. It carries a bunch of mutations that seem to have rendered the current flu vaccine somewhat less effective. (Though far from completely ineffective — more on that below.) Nor does it help that only around 44 percent of US adults have taken the flu shot so far, well below vaccination rates before the Covid pandemic. The decline has been particularly sharp for children, who are more vulnerable to the flu, which has resulted in higher than normal pediatric hospitalizations.
As bad as this season is shaping up to be, chances are most of us will suffer through it and then forget until the next year comes around. After all, it’s just the flu, right? But even........