Should Britain brace itself for a major flu outbreak this winter?

Could flu be a bigger problem than Covid this winter? Professor Anthony Harnden, the deputy chair of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, has warned that it might be, suggesting that the low prevalence of flu over recent months could come back to ‘bite us’ as the weather worsens. There are also fears that reduced levels of flu in recent months could make it much harder to develop a successful jab.

In a normal year, the route to a flu vaccine is well trodden. The annual flu vaccination programme first began in England in the 1960s, and since 2000, all over 65s have been offered the jab every year. Healthy children have also been offered a live attenuated influenza vaccine (LAIV) in school, administered as a nasal spray, for the last eight years.

But because developing the flu vaccine effectively involves a sophisticated guessing game, this will be a much more difficult process this year. Flu is an intelligent virus which mutates very quickly and has many different strains; the vaccine must be tweaked annually to try and ‘catch’ the latest variants of concern.