Booster vaccines proposed for seniors amid rare summer flu outbreak

Taipei, Aug. 14 (CNA) Influenza now appears to be a year-round disease, and the government should provide publicly funded booster influenza vaccines for people aged 65 and above to achieve longer-term protection, an expert recommended Wednesday.

Huang Li-min (黃立民), an attending physician specializing in pediatric infectious disease at National Taiwan University Hospital, said at a press conference that the flu epidemic, the first summer flu outbreak in Taiwan in seven years, has been "very severe."

There have been 1,231 influenza cases with severe complications recorded as of Aug. 9, Huang said, showing that the flu epidemic was not over and that it had become a year-round phenomenon.

Statistics compiled by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) show flu numbers are up, with the number of visits to outpatient and emergency care clinics by people with flu-like symptoms in the first 32 weeks of 2024 up 70 percent from the same period last year.

Given those trends, Huang argued that Taiwan should follow advanced countries in offering adjuvanted (immune-response enhanced), high-dose and genetically recombinant flu vaccines as the standard publicly funded vaccine for people aged 65 and older to protect them for a full year.

Traditional flu vaccines provide protection for only six months.

Huang said the heightened flu issues are related to what he described as an "immunity debt" caused by reduced exposure to immune stimulation due to preventive measures during the COVID-19 pandemic that reduced people's active and passive immunity.

He speculated that this "immunity debt" effect may not be paid off until the end of next year.

In the past, the incidence of influenza infection typically began to increase in autumn and peaked in the winter months, Huang said, but with global warming the flu now occurs year-round.

When the difference in temperature between winter and summer is significant enough, a large number of people get infected in winter, and people infected with the virus develop an immune response that makes it less likely they will be infected with the flu in the summer.

If the winter months are not cold enough, however, fewer people are affected during that time of the year and the flu will be spread over all four seasons, he said.

At the same time, according to Huang, a surge in travel over the past two years since COVID-19 travel restrictions were lifted has helped spread flu viruses around the world and given them more of a year-round presence.

Thus, providing protection for a full year was important and only the more advanced vaccines could achieve that, he said.

CDC Deputy Director-General and spokesman Lo Yi-chun (羅一鈞) told CNA in response that the government had already completed its purchasing process for publicly funded flu vaccines this year.

In terms of the idea of giving the booster flu vaccines to those 65 and older, the issue has been handed over to the Center for Drug Examination (CDE) to do a cost-benefit analysis of the newer vaccines, Lo said, and the proposal could be discussed by an expert committee in the spring of 2025.