Super Flu? More Like Super Hype

The BBC informs us that we have entered a ‘Super-Flu’ crisis, “unlike anything since the pandemic”.   Other outlets scream that hospitals are facing a “worst case scenario”.  Wes Streeting expands by telling us that a “tidal wave of flu” is tearing through them. Schools have closed pre-emptively, particularly in Wales. Some closures are to provide ‘firebreaks’, not because they have many cases.  Leeds schoolchildren have been told not to sing in assembly. Shadowy ‘NHS Leaders’ advise the public to wear masks, with this recommendation shuffling-ly endorsed by the PM. Masking has been mandated at a few hospitals. Vaccination is being pushed, including of toddlers ‘to protect granny’.

It is all horribly reminiscent of 2020-21.

The actual statistics, published yesterday by the UKHSA and covering the period up to December 11th, therefore come as a surprise. They tell that “influenza activity [has] increased and [the virus] is circulating at ‘medium’ levels”, as confirmed by lab testing and GP surveillance. 

‘Medium’ doesn’t feature widely in the Super-Flu headlines.

Yet it seems accurate.  Figures 1-3, from the UKHSA’s report, illustrate GP consultations for influenza-like illness, then hospitalisations and then ICU/high dependency admissions for laboratory-confirmed influenza. A recent article in the Financial Times indicates that there were just 106 patients in intensive care with flu last week. I can find no mention of deaths.

None of the UKHSA data show the present winter to be exceptional, at least so far. As in 2022-23, flu has come early, but not remarkably so. Very likely, as in 2022-23, it will also peak early.  Maybe it will peak higher; maybe not. Current prevalence is still no more than two thirds of that in the worst recent winters, again notably 2022-23. What’s more, prevalence is not accelerating any more rapidly than in 2022-23, arguing against a vastly higher peak.

This is not to deny that flu is circulating, nor that it can be serious or lethal for the frail elderly and (unlike Covid) in the very young. If you are infected, it’s sensible to stay home, keep warm and drink plenty of fluids, and also to keep away from vulnerable elderly relatives and friends. As for masks, their futility has been spelt out too often on these pages to need reiteration. I would note only that in Taiwan, where half the metro and bus passengers remain perma-masked, flu achieved a nasty outbreak at the start of 2025, with 101 deaths and almost 140,000 emergency room visits in a week, from a population one third of the UK’s.

As for vaccination, the good news is that flu vaccines are of the traditional killed or live-attenuated sort, without the safety concerns of mRNA products. Their efficacy is modest, though. Cochrane concluded that they probably reduced infection in both the elderly and healthy children. Nevertheless, inconvenient straws blow in the wind. Cowling and colleagues found that vaccination increased one’s likelihood of catching other (typically less severe) respiratory viruses and, last year, the prestigious Cleveland Clinic found that vaccinated staff members were, after some delay, 27% more likely to become infected. Neither observation has been fully explained, but both are compatible with the hypothesis that we live in simultaneous equilibria with multiple respiratory viruses, experiencing cycles of infection, immunity, waning immunity and reinfection. Vaccines briefly perturb individual human/virus equilibria, but their consequences for the wider ‘ecosystem’ are unpredictable, as is the speed and degree to which vulnerability to the target virus returns. Notions of herd immunity are naïve in this context. Instead, everything is transient and fluid, with the viruses evolving to accelerate their immune escape.

Through successive mutations, the ‘K’ variant of influenza H3N2 – responsible for the Super-Flu – has drifted away from the J2 clade included in this year’s vaccine.  Early UKHSA data claim 72-75% efficacy in respect of preventing A&E attendance and admission for children, but only 32-39% in adults. As the authors note, these are early data, before immunity wanes. Moreover, they were calculated by counting folk who were infected within 14 days of vaccination as ‘unvaccinated’ and, as Norman Fenton has repeatedly pointed out, this biases assessment in favour of the vaccine. The best you can say is that the vaccine may give some protection and is very unlikely to do any harm. You won’t end up making flu proteins for two years, as can happen with SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and some mRNA vaccinees.

Returning, though to the central issue, the present case numbers simply don’t justify the hype. Perhaps it’s post-pandemic hysteria. Perhaps it is a media lust for any fear porn, however weak the evidence. Perhaps the Government is scared of even normal winter pressures when the junior doctors are about to strike. Maybe it is a mix of all these things and others besides. But the notion that it’s a ‘Super-Flu’ crisis, “unlike anything since the pandemic” is way over the top. Even the BBC Verify ought to have spotted that.

David Livermore is a retired Professor of Medical Microbiology at the University of East Anglia.