Hacker News Reader

Comment by SV_BubbleTime | Hacker News Reader

That’s not how it works.

We basically guess what the US flu will be by what is “popular” in Asia or Southern Hemisphere, we figure in about 6 months or so it’ll be in the US. I have no idea how Europe or Rest Of World makes flu vaccine guesses.

Guess what though? They do the same. What is “popular” in the west MAY be popular in Asia in a few months.

The flu game is constantly a best guess of what others saw months ago.

View on HN

The flu is seasonal, so the northern hemisphere looks at what flu is in the Southern Hemisphere during their flu season and vice versa.

We seem to have been increasingly getting bad at that guessing game... Thankfully coronavirus put the kaibosh on the flu at least in the short term, so if it was the flu pangenome making a meta-evolutionary play, we may have reset that clock.

False. The seasonal influenza vaccine creators haven't been increasingly getting bad at that guessing game. Vaccine effectiveness estimates have fluctuated up and down randomly with no clear trend.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/past-seasons-estimates...

are we looking at the same data? It's hovering around 40% with at least two duds, when it used to be in the high fifties, even 60%. Plus, this is a table of strictly "seasonal" flus. There is no clear definition of what constitutes a "seasonal" flu; If I'm not mistaken, "non-seasonal" is just a catch-all for flus that weren't part of the vaccine package.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com