Flu vaccine barely working this year, CDC says
The flu vaccine is barely protecting people this year – reducing the risk of serious disease by just 23 percent, federal health officials said Thursday.
It’s not the worst year ever for the flu vaccine – there have been years when the flu vaccine was only 10 percent effective. But it’s not good news for people trying to avoid the flu.
Nonetheless, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says people should still get a flu vaccine, because it does work well against strains of flu that may not be circulating just now, but that may show up at any time.“Right now, the effectiveness is not as good as we normally see with influenza. We want people to know that so they know to call their doctor for antivirals if they are sick,” says CDC’s Dr. Joe Bresee.
The CDC had been warning the vaccine might not work well this year. Just after drug makers started cooking up batches of flu vaccine for the 2014-2015 season, a sneaky strain of H3N2 started circulating that’s different from the strain the vaccine protects against. Flu vaccines take months to make and it was too late to change the formula for this year.
So the CDC’s been reminding people that there are three antiviral drugs on the market that can help you recover more quickly from flu. Tamiflu is the pill most widely prescribed, and there are injectable and inhalable drugs, too.
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