The number of Americans willing to get a flu shot declined during the pandemic. In response, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Monday launched a new digital ad campaign in hopes that it will encourage the vaccine-hesitant to get the shot.
The agency’s new messaging is: The flu shot won’t prevent a person from getting sick but can tame wild flu symptoms into mild flu symptoms.
The “Wild to Mild” campaign is part of the agency’s efforts to rebrand expectations about what yearly influenza vaccines can and can’t do and provides infographics, animated images, social media marketing materials, and other online resources people can use to encourage their “friends, loved ones, and followers on social media” to get vaccinated.
Ads for the new campaign began rolling out this week on radio and social media platforms targeting pregnant women and parents of young children, as vaccination rates have declined in these high-risk groups.
Dr. Bill Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University and member of the CDC’s advisory panel on vaccines, told CNN he believes the agency is taking the right approach.
“With these respiratory viruses, flu included, the vaccines aren’t very good at preventing milder disease. They’re much better at preventing serious complications. And I think we have not been very clear in presenting that information,” Schaffner said. “We have to acknowledge that. We have to say ‘Yep, it won’t prevent that mild disease. But here’s the benefit.’”
This messaging is similar to that now given for COVID-19 vaccines. After being initially described by health agencies as a means of preventing the wider spread of the disease, with the advent of growing breakthrough infections, COVID-19 vaccines were later described in official messaging as a means of reducing an individual’s risk of severe illness, hospitalization and death.
Efficacy of Flu Shots
According to the CDC, all flu vaccines for the 2023–2024 season will be quadrivalent vaccines, meaning they will contain strains designed to target four different flu viruses. The CDC annually conducts its own studies to determine how well influenza vaccines protect against the flu and uses those and previous studies with different strains to support the statements made about influenza vaccine effectiveness.
Factors affecting vaccine efficacy depend on which flu viruses are circulating and how well-matched those viruses are to flu vaccines. According to the agency, flu vaccine effectiveness has ranged from 10 percent in 2004 to 54 percent in 2023.
In a September 2023 study published by the CDC in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a research team from the CDC analyzed data from 2,780 patients hospitalized with severe acute respiratory infection from five South American countries from March 27 to July 9, 2023.
The researchers determined the 2023 Southern Hemisphere seasonal influenza vaccine reduced the risk of influenza-associated hospitalizations by 52 percent, with an estimated protection of 55 percent against the predominant A(H1N1)pdm09 strain. Because circulating viruses are genetically similar to those in the Northern Hemisphere, they concluded the formulation may offer equal protection.
The current study used to support CDC recommendations only focused on specific high-risk groups, including pregnancy over three months, but the agency recommends all people in the United States ages 6 months and older receive a flu shot in September or October.
The agency says other recent studies show influenza vaccination reduces the risk of illness by 40 to 60 percent among the overall population during seasons when most circulating flu viruses are well-matched to the strains used to make flu vaccines. Yet the other CDC studies used by the agency to support flu vaccine efficacy specifically during pregnancy are several years old, funded by the agency, and relate to other vaccines.
This article has been updated, including the headline. The previous version contained un-evidenced speculation on the reason for the fall off in numbers and an incomplete discussion on safety and one-sided criticism of the simultaneous rollout of three respiratory virus vaccines. The Epoch Times regrets this error.