The campaign to beat the pandemic

Comment The Return of the Mask – Superflu and Covid

Joseph Healy writes:

The appearance of a new strain of flu and the resulting health pronouncements and media coverage leading up to Xmas led to a sudden resurgence of mask wearing among the public. Those of us who have been Covid cautious over the last few years were joined by a new group shaken out of complacency by the appearance of the so called “superflu” and it seemed that the public were suddenly aware of the dangers of infection again. This was particularly visible on public transport and even at a concert which I attended before Xmas, where I am usually the lone masker.

What is interesting is that it was public health messaging, together with widespread press coverage which turned things around and therein lies the rub as it’s precisely because of the lack of these that the public carries on believing that Covid is not serious or has gone away.

Firstly, as Professor Christina Pagel (formerly of Independent Sage) pointed out it was not a superflu as such but simply normal flu which arrived much earlier than the normal flu season and thus hit the NHS and the public unawares. It is true that the virus had mutated over the summer and that the vaccine manufacturers had been unable to produce a vaccine tailored to it in time but that was not the main cause of the impact.

There were two main reasons why the flu hit so hard this year. One was the low takeup of the vaccine, especially among those who were vulnerable but also incredibly among NHS staff, where takeup was lower than in 2019 before the pandemic. All of this demonstrates the insidious influence of the anti-vaxxers, which we now witness playing out horrendously in Robert Kennedy’s US where scientists have been sacked and the access to many vaccines seriously curtailed – the latest being vaccines against meningitis in children.

However, with the hospitals clogged with flu patients and the resulting media storm there was a significant increase in flu vaccine takeup, so much so that many pharmacies complained of running out of stock. Indeed it was the higher than average takeup which contributed (along with increased masking) to the tapering off of the wave as Xmas approached, although many experts have said that Xmas and New Year socialising may lead to a further wave.

The other issue which has been neglected by the media, as part of its deliberate ignoring of Covid, is that many scientists have speculated and there are scientific papers supporting this hypothesis, that many immunes systems have been dysregulated by Covid (a vascular disease) leaving people more open to serious infections such as flu, particularly after an increased number of Covid infections. This may be the real explanation for superflu, not that the flu itself was stronger but that the ability to resist it had declined resulting in more serious pneumonia and other consequences.

Scientific research has continually shown that an increased number of Covid infections seriously impacts on T8 immune cells and this also explains why many complain that they are constantly ill. With many people experiencing 2 or 3 Covid infections per year, Long Covid is not the only danger but also that the immune system is so damaged that they are open to a range of infections which they were not affected by previously and that any resulting illness takes longer to recover from.

The unwillingness to confront the reality of Covid leads to attempts to blame illness on everything else. The lesson of the superflu period of this winter is that if the same effort and awareness were put into protecting the public from Covid we would all be in a better place. The flu panic brought a lot of people to an increased awareness of their health and how to protect it with masking etc but the real cuckoo in the nest remains Covid. Its impact will continue to plague society while it appears that public health has abandoned the field and the media ignores it.