Flu season is several months away, but flu shots are available now. Does it make sense to get vaccinated this early?
“I would suggest later, in October,” said Dr. John Swartzberg, an expert on infectious disease at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. “The flu vaccine tends to work really well, but it drifts off at around six months.”
Flu season starts much earlier on the East coast. Here in Washington, it typically begins around Thanksgiving, reaches its peak in January and February, and then starts drifting down in March.
“So, you really want to have a robust immune response to that vaccine at the time when you’re likely to get exposed to influenza. So later in October would be a good time,” Dr. Swartzberg said.
Of course, there are some situations where you don’t want to wait.
“Some people may be traveling or maybe doing other activities that could expose them to influenza sooner. In that case, I’d get it right away,” he said.
No one can predict with any certainty how bad the coming flu season will be. But, in some cases, what happened in the Southern hemisphere can be a harbinger of what we can expect.
In Australia they’re just coming out of winter, and their flu season was “pretty bad… worse than in the last several years,” Dr. Swartzberg told me.
