Missed Vax Opportunities
- Don Mosier | Rimini Road
The 2025–2026 flu season has been severe, driven by a highly mutated H3N2 variant (subclade K) that became dominant in late 2025. As of March 2026, the CDC reports high severity for children and moderate for adults, with at least 26 million illnesses and 21,000 deaths. Vaccine effectiveness is estimated at 24%–36% for infections.
It didn’t need to be this way. The traditional flu vaccine is prepared in chicken eggs and takes several months to produce. Each spring, there is a guessing game trying to predict which flu variant will be prevalent in the fall. This year, the guess was wrong.
The missed opportunity was to use mRNA vaccine technology to match the new flu variant. A more effective flu vaccine could have been made available in weeks rather than months. The death count for flu infections could have been reduced by an estimated 90%. The freeze on funding for mRNA vaccines by the misguided policies of the Health and Human Services (HHS) Department, headed by vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is responsible for allowing these preventable deaths to occur.
A court order issued in mid-March may reverse some of the vaccine restrictions imposed by HHS in the last year, a victory for several medical societies that insisted on scientific evidence for the changes. The court’s decision is being challenged by the current administration, and the final outcome is yet to be decided.