United States: This year, the flu vaccine in the U.S. has changed because a strain of the flu virus has disappeared. This happened because many people wore masks and kept their distance from each other during COVID-19.
For more than ten years, the flu shot helped protect against this strain, but now it’s gone, so the vaccine won’t include it anymore. Health reporter Sarah Boden has the details on these changes.
As reported by npr.org, in the beginning of 2020 the COVID virus was able to infiltrate every nation of the world despite people being isolated and wearing masks. Namely, an unintended concomitant of that peculiar, isolative year is that a form of the flu known as B/Yamagata appears to have vanished.
People are only just starting mid / toward the start of 2020, understanding that you weren’t seeing sequences. And I didn’t comprehend it at first, and I reckon dozens of other people didn’t too.
Kevin R. McCarthy works on the co-evolution of viruses at the University of Pittsburgh; Center for Vaccine Research. Speaking of the bubble period, he claims that what happened with B/Yamagata was quite unexpected. And if it is truly the case then this will be the first example of a virus that has ever possibly gone extinct due to people being away from one another. So, social distancing can curb a virus, but not Covid-19.
However, there were two weaknesses that B/Yamagata was facing now. First of all, the strain of flu has not been around for decades, so there was actually population immunity. Moreover, it existed side by side with another flu virus.
Therefore, the B/Yamagata strain, is circulating with sort of its clone sister, the B/Victoria strain. And for the past few years, the Victoria lineage was on the right side of global supremacy.
The Food and Drug Administration argued that B/Yamagata has not appeared for several years, which means that it should be removed from the annual flu shot. But that’s the right call, argues Kawsar Talaat, an infectious disease physician at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
KAWSAR TALAAT: In my opinion anyone that includes a strain for which we don’t expect anybody to ever get infected is putting in some potential risks with it with no potential benefits.