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The CDC Just Published New Flu Vaccine Guidelines: What You Need To Know
Flu season is coming. Here's what to know. (Getty Images)
Flu season typically runs from October to May, making the unofficial start just weeks away. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued new guidelines for this flu season — and there's a surprising change in the mix.
Here's everything you need to know about the new flu guidance, plus how to prepare for this tricky time of year.
What's new about the guidelines?This year's guidelines are "pretty standard, with one big exception," Dr. Thomas Russo, chief of infectious diseases at the University at Buffalo in New York, tells Yahoo Life. That's the CDC's position on which flu vaccines people with egg allergies can use.
The CDC says people with egg allergies can now get any vaccine — egg-based or non-egg-based — that is "otherwise appropriate for their age and health status." Previous recommendations had been that people with severe egg allergies should avoid egg-based vaccines.
"Data now shows that people who are egg-allergic really do not have a major contraindication to egg-based flu vaccines," Dr. Amesh A. Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, tells Yahoo Life.
While this is new in the U.S., it isn't in other parts of the world. "The U.S. Has now caught up to the Canadians and Europeans, who for some time have looked at the data regarding rare but serious allergic reactions with the flu vaccine and have come to the conclusion that eggs have almost nothing to do with it," Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist and professor at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, says.
Schaffner says that "there will be a few people who are still twitchy" about getting an egg-based vaccine, noting that egg-free vaccines will continue to be available.
What's in this year's flu vaccine?Flu vaccines for this season are designed to target these strains, per the CDC:
Egg-based vaccines
A/Victoria/4897/2022 (H1N1)pdm09-like virus
A/Darwin/9/2021 (H3N2)-like virus
B/Austria/1359417/2021 (B/Victoria lineage)-like virus
B/Phuket/3073/2013 (B/Yamagata lineage)-like virus
Cell- or recombinant-based vaccines
A/Wisconsin/67/2022 (H1N1)pdm09-like virus
A/Darwin/6/2021 (H3N2)-like virus
B/Austria/1359417/2021 (B/Victoria lineage)-like virus
B/Phuket/3073/2013 (B/Yamagata lineage)-like virus
Worth noting: There is just one update to this year's flu vaccine from last year's.
As for how effective this year's vaccine will be, Russo says we'll have to wait and see. "Sometimes we hit, sometimes we miss," he says. "It happens every single year."
When will flu vaccines become available?They'll be available soon. Many major pharmacies, including CVS and Walgreens, are allowing people to schedule vaccine appointments for as early as Sept. 1. Some pharmacies may even offer them now, along with doctor's offices — it really depends on when supplies arrive at any given location, Russo says.
When should I get my flu vaccine?It's best to hold off a little if you can. "Ideally, you want to get your flu vaccine at the end of September, in October or the very first week or so in November — that's the ideal time," Schaffner says. Timing your flu vaccine this way helps ensure you have adequate protection through the peak of flu season, he explains.
"If you get it too early, the protection begins to wane at the end of the flu season," he adds.
There is an exception, though: Children under the age of 8 who have never received a flu vaccine will need two doses, separated by a month, Schaffner points out. If your child meets those criteria, he recommends contacting your pediatrician to get an appointment scheduled now.
When is flu season at its worst?Flu season usually peaks between December and February, per the CDC, which is why the timing of your vaccine is important. "It doesn't make sense to get vaccinated this early," Adalja says.
How can I prepare for flu season?Getting vaccinated is an important place to start, Russo says. "Vaccination is the pillar of protection," he says.
But he also suggests that you keep high-quality masks handy in case flu activity rises in your area and that you remain aware of risk-benefit situations as flu cases increase. "If you're high-risk, you may want to avoid scenarios that are indoors, with lots of people and poor ventilation," Russo says.
Schaffner says this year's flu activity is likely to increase in October, as opposed to last year, when it started early. "There will be flu. Will it be mild, moderate or severe this year? We just don't know," he says. "But there will be flu, and we should protect ourselves."
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America's Alcohol Czar Wants Stricter Federal Guidelines For Drinking
The federal government might soon take an interest in how many cold ones you've been cracking open.
George Koob, director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, tells the Daily Mail that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) might soon revise its dietary guidelines to recommend that adults consume no more than two alcoholic drinks per week. Canada's health authorities recently shifted to that guideline, and Koob says that the U.S. Could follow suit.
"I mean, they're not going to go up, I'm pretty sure," Koob said of the ongoing reevaluation of federal alcohol guidelines, a process that likely won't be completed until 2025, according to the Daily Mail. "So, if [alcohol consumption guidelines] go in any direction, it would be toward Canada."
Currently, the federal dietary guidelines advise no more than two drinks per day for adult men and one drink per day for adult women. Revising that down to two drinks per week would be a dramatic shift, to say the least.
Thankfully, most Americans don't give a shit what the federal guidelines for drinking say. Following federal dietary guidelines to the letter of the law would mean a joyless existence devoid of many fine drinks (particularly if you're a woman), anything less than well-done steak, or eggs benedict. Oh, and don't forget to microwave your prosciutto!
It's also true, of course, that the government is in no way forcing Americans to follow these rules. This doesn't even rise to the level of a backhanded ban like the ones that are aimed at driving gas stoves into extinction. Still, these guidelines come with an air of authority to them—or, at least, the sense that they were made by people who know what they're talking about.
But, often, they don't. Remember the food pyramid? My entire generation was raised on the notion that we were supposed to eat six to 11 servings of starch per day, thanks to poorly researched government-based dietary guidelines
If the U.S. Follows Canada in issuing dramatically lower guidelines for alcohol consumption, the USDA will likely justify the decision by pointing to a headline-generating 2018 article published in the British medical journal The Lancet that argued the safe level of alcohol consumption was basically zero. Indeed, in his remarks to the Daily Mail, Koob echoed that study by claiming there are "no benefits" to drinking alcohol in terms of physical health. The World Health Organization has been pushing a similar message in recent years.
Of course, that ignores many of the possible benefits that human beings derive from drinking—like social lubrication, relaxation, and fun.
"[Alcohol] helps us to be more creative. It helps us to be more communal. It helps us to cooperate on a large scale," Edward Slingerland, author of Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization told ReasonTV last year. "It helps to make it easier for us to kind of rub shoulders with each other in these large-scale societies that we live in. So it solved a bunch of adaptive problems that we uniquely face as a species because of this weird lifestyle we have."
As with so many other public health policies—many of which were on obvious display during the COVID-19 pandemic—alcohol guidelines focused exclusively on physical well-being at the expense of everything else that makes a life worth living will naturally be overly cautious and unrealistic.
Setting strict rules about alcohol consumption also requires ignoring other evidence that, actually, drinking might be good for you, as long as it's done in moderation.
A study published in June by the medical journal BMC Medicine comparing drinkers and nondrinkers found that "infrequent, light, or moderate drinkers were at a lower risk of mortality from all causes, CVD, chronic lower respiratory tract diseases, Alzheimer's disease, and influenza and pneumonia" when compared to lifelong teetotalers. Of course, heavy drinkers had a higher risk of dying "from all causes, cancer, and accidents."
Having more information about the ways alcohol affects our health—positive and negative—is essential for adults who want to make informed decisions about what they ingest. But there's no need for formal guidelines promulgated by government agencies, and that's especially true when the people writing those rules are only looking at part of the picture.
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