Bracing for rough respiratory virus season, European officials urge vaccination

LONDON — Health officials in the U.K. and Europe are ramping up their campaigns urging eligible people to get another vaccine round against Covid and flu, promoting the immunizations as people’s best way to protect themselves and reduce pressure on health systems during what is expected to be another tough winter.

In the 2022-2023 season, parts of Europe endured early and severe waves of respiratory viruses and consequently suffered drug shortages, with a particular crunch on medicines used to treat children. The impact of cold-and-flu season also amounted to another blow to health systems emerging out of the pandemic.

“We need to act now despite the uncertainties around when increases and if increases will occur,” Andrea Ammon, the director of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, said at a recent press briefing. “We have to act now to minimize the burden on health care systems.”

Priority groups for Covid boosters and flu shots include older adults, pregnant people, and those who have weakened immune systems. For flu, in particular, health officials are also stressing that children are vulnerable to severe outcomes and should be vaccinated soon, even if parents may not think they’re at risk.

England saw a drop in flu vaccine uptake in every target group — from adults 65 and older to pregnant women to health care workers — from the 2021-2022 season to the 2022-2023 season, echoing a trend in the U.S. that health officials there are also trying to reverse. But whereas 80% of older adults still got a flu shot last season, only 43.7% of 2- to 3-year-olds did, down from half the prior season.

While modelers estimate flu shots prevented some 25,000 hospitalizations in England last season, there were still 10,000 children hospitalized with flu.

“We really need to increase the uptake in 2- to 3-year-olds, and also in young teens,” Susan Hopkins, chief medical adviser at the U.K. Health Security Agency, said at a briefing Friday.

Like their U.S. counterparts, European regulators have in recent months approved new tools for blunting the impact of RSV, another seasonal respiratory virus and a leading cause of hospitalizations for both older adults and babies. They include vaccines for older adults, as well as one that can be used during pregnancy, which extends immunity to newborns. There’s also a preventative antibody therapy that can be given to infants ahead of RSV season.

But while European officials said some member states are starting to offer some of the new tools, they are largely still in the process of being rolled out, leading to more of a focus on Covid and flu in the current campaigns.

In the U.K., for example, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, which advises the government on vaccine policy, has said that a cost-effective RSV program should be developed for both infants and older adults, but health officials said Friday they didn’t expect to have the tools ready to deploy this season.

The latest Covid shots have once again been updated to better match circulating strains. In the U.K., health officials moved up the launch of the autumn booster campaign in response to the emergence of a possibly concerning variant, though the new strain’s impact has been more limited than what some initially feared.

Overall, the Covid-causing SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus continues to ebb and flow, with some debate about whether it can now be considered a seasonal virus. The pandemic response also severely limited transmission of other respiratory viruses in 2020 and into 2021, altering their behavior in the ensuing years.

It’s difficult to predict the exact shape of anticipated waves ahead of time, and different viruses can peak at different times during the broader season. But it’s still expected that SARS-2, influenza, RSV, and certain other bugs will have overlapping waves later this year and into next.

“What worries me is perhaps if we have the combination of severe flu, severe Covid, plus all the other winter viruses that we get, all happening at the same time,” said Thomas Waite, England’s deputy chief medical officer.