You May Now Give Yourself A Flu Vaccine At Home With FluMist Home
FluMist Home Is The Home Version Of FluMist Vaccine
The vaccine itself isn't new. The FluMist nasal spray vaccine received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval back in 2003 to be used for those from five to 49 years of age. The FDA added kids from two through five years of age to this approval in 2007. But until last year, like all other flu vaccines, you had to get some kind of qualified healthcare worker to give you the vaccine. That all changed in September 2024 when the FDA approved FluMist to be the first self-administer-able flu vaccine out there. Not coincidentally, it's also the only nasal spray flu vaccine out there. It's probably a whole lot easier and safer for folks to squirt something up their noses rather than stick their arms with needles.
Not surprisingly, AstraZeneca wasn't ready to go with the home version of FluMist, known as FluMist Home, last flu season, which was a particularly nasty one, as I covered in Forbes tat the time. But the company is ready for this upcoming flu season. Starting this fall, if you are an adult under 50 or a parent of a child who's older than two you can order the vaccine via an online platform. Now you will have to complete a medical screening questionnaire that will be reviewed by a licensed healthcare professional before the vaccines gets prescribed to you or your tykes. Most types of commercial insurance should cover this vaccine. But you may have to fork out $8.99 for shipping and handling.
Now, if you are an adult 50 years or older or a kid from six months up to two years of age and saying WTF, as in 'what the FluMist,' for me, you aren't eligible for this vaccine. That's because the vaccine uses live (but weakened) versions of the flu virus, which is different from the other flu vaccines that use dead or inactivated versions of the flu virus. The live, weakened versions of the flu virus may generate a stronger immune response and thus stronger protection than the dead versions. However, if you've got a weaker immune systems such as when you get older than 50 or are younger than two years of age, you want to be careful about getting a live virus, even if it is weakened, injected into you.
FluMist Home Could Help Increase Flu Vaccination Rates
The flu vaccine typically offers anywhere from 30% to 60% protection against the flu, depending on how well the flu strains in the flu vaccine match the circulating strains that year. Since it takes about six months to produce the flu vaccine, the selection of the strains for the vaccine need to occur well in advance of the flu season. That's why sometimes it's a good match, sometimes things are way off and often it's somewhere in between.
As with many other vaccines against infectious diseases, how well you are protected against the flu does depend on how many other people around you got vaccinated as well. Last flu season, an estimated 46.7% of adults and 49.2% of children got vaccinated against the flu. That's compared to 49.2% and 53.4% for the flu season prior in 2023-2024, according the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. These close-to-but-not-quite-half have been rather typical each flu season recently, as I have written in Forbes previously.
Those numbers ain't great. You may have heard of the concept of herd immunity, which I have written about before in Forbes. While the flu vaccine will help protect the individuals who got it, ideally you want the vaccination coverage to be significantly higher than the herd immunity threshold for flu, which is around 50%. When the vaccination coverage is well above the herd immunity threshold, the virus begins to run out of susceptible people to infect, which in turn slows the spread of the flu virus in the population.
It's not completely clear why over the half the U.S. population did not get the flu vaccine last flu season. For some, it might have been a matter of convenience. They may have not gotten vaccinated simply because they didn't find the time to take time off from work to go to a clinic or pharmacy. For such folks, having something like FluMist Home available may increase their chances of getting vaccinated.
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