A world without flu is possible

Let’s start with the bad news. A world without flu is possible We’re finally making progress toward a universal flu vaccine. Bryan Walsh is a senior editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate teams and the Unexplainable and The Gray Area podcasts. He is also the editor of Vox’s Future Perfect section and writes the Good News newsletter. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk. 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 normal influenza is far more than just a seasonal nuisance. The World Health Organization estimates that there are around 1 billion flu infections in a given year, which can lead to as many as 5 million severe cases and up to 650,000 flu-related respiratory deaths per year, mostly among the very young and the very old. The burden of flu goes beyond those numbers: CDC research indicates that flu infections can raise the risk of heart attacks and strokes. Plus all those sick days add up to as much as 111 million lost work days in the US alone, while childhood infections lead to more school absences and a knock-on effect for parents forced to stay home. Oh, and chances are decent that the (inevitable) next global pandemic will come from a mutant flu virus, just like past pandemics in...

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