OMINOUS

This Year’s Flu Vaccine May Have Been ‘Mismatched,’ WHO Expert Warns

The global health body chooses the strains its thinks will be dominant for each year’s vaccines—and a leading epidemiologist worries this year’s pick is wrong.

A leading influenza epidemiologist has called into question whether the World Health Organization has chosen the correct influenza strains to target with this year’s vaccine. The WHO’s so-called strain-selection committee meets twice a year to study trends to determine which four varieties to include in the four-in-one shot based on global flu trends. But Danuta Skowronski, with the British Columbia Center for Disease Control in Vancouver, told STAT News she believes this year the flu shot contains a “mismatch.” Skowronski says the flu trends changed and the committee may have misjudged which strain would become dominant. “That H3N2 wave” that was responsible for the late-season wave of U.S. cases last year “was evolving at the time that they met in February,” Skowronski said of the selection panel. “And there was a diverse mix of H3 viruses. And it wasn’t clear to them, I guess, [which strain]… would emerge the clear winner.”