Health security

The flu season isn't over yet, but the FDA is already working on next year’s vaccine

We’re past the peak of flu season—though we’ve still got weeks to go before it's totally over—but the Food & Drug Administration is already meeting to decide what will go in next year’s vaccine.

This may feel early to you, but it’s actually the normal time of year to make the call. It will take months for pharmaceutical companies to create and distribute vaccines across the U.S., so the FDA has to get things rolling now if they want folks vaccinated in the fall. The only difference is that this year, we’re facing the growing realization that we need a better flu shot.

It is, admittedly, difficult to predict which flu strains will predominate months in advance, but we’ve actually gotten quite good at it. Even though this year’s vaccine was only 36 percent effective overall, the problem was not with the prediction. FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb wrote in a statement on Monday that “we don’t think it was a question of getting the particular H3N2 strain wrong when we set out to produce this year’s flu season.” Their data actually suggest that “this year’s vaccines do reasonably match the circulating flu strains that are causing most of the illnesses.” The problem, he wrote, is in how we make the vaccines.