- Add A New Radar To An Old Air-Defense Missile, And You’d Get The Ukrainian 5V28—Kyiv’s Most Potent Deep-Strike Weapon Forbes
- Ukraine rejigs 36-foot-long Soviet-era missile to hit Russia: UK intel Business Insider
- US struggles to keep up with demand of ballistic missiles to aid Ukraine: Report WION
- UK Defense Ministry: Russia’s Aerospace Forces likely under intense pressure to improve air defense Yahoo News
- Ukraine is re-engineering a 36-foot-long Soviet-era missile system to strike inside Russia, UK intel says Business Insider India
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Tag Archives: potent
Samuel L. Jackson Excels in ‘Secret Invasion,’ Marvel’s Potent New Series: TV Review – Variety
- Samuel L. Jackson Excels in ‘Secret Invasion,’ Marvel’s Potent New Series: TV Review Variety
- ‘Secret Invasion’ Review: Marvel’s Superhero-Lite Spy Thriller Is High on Twists, Low on Wits IndieWire
- SECRET INVASION Social Reactions Promise A Tense Thriller With Killer Performance From Samuel L. Jackson CBM (Comic Book Movie)
- ‘Secret Invasion’ Review: Marvel’s Best Spy Thriller Since ‘Winter Soldier’ Inverse
- ‘Secret Invasion’ Review: Samuel L. Jackson Returns to the MCU in a Disney+ Series With Few Surprises Yahoo Entertainment
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Here’s what happened to a girl who mistakenly ate 96 potent cannabis gummies
A 12-year-old girl ate her father’s stash of cannabis gummies, thinking they were just candy. Within an hour, she felt strange. She opened the apartment door and fell down the stairs. Her mother found her on the stairs and tried to talk to her, but the girl was incoherent. She took the girl to the hospital and fortunately, she made a full recovery.
The father sounds like an idiot. He was a cannabis edible aficionado, and would get so wasted on gummies that he once fell down the same stairs his daughter did. After that happened, his wife banned weed gummies from the house. But the father bought a bunch of weed gummies and added them to a bag of regular gummies, and put them in the kitchen cupboard to fool her. Shortly after that, his daughter ate them.
It’s a big mistake to make weed edibles that look like cookies and candy. They should look like medicine or something unappetizing to deter people from accidentally eating them.
Thumbnail image: Wollertz/Shutterstock.com
Read original article here
How a Microsoft blunder opened millions of PCs to potent malware attacks
Getty Images
For almost two years, Microsoft officials botched a key Windows defense, an unexplained lapse that left customers open to a malware infection technique that has been especially effective in recent months.
Microsoft officials have steadfastly asserted that Windows Update will automatically add new software drivers to a blocklist designed to thwart a well-known trick in the malware infection playbook. The malware technique—known as BYOVD, short for “bring your own vulnerable driver”—makes it easy for an attacker with administrative control to bypass Windows kernel protections. Rather than writing an exploit from scratch, the attacker simply installs any one of dozens of third-party drivers with known vulnerabilities. Then the attacker exploits those vulnerabilities to gain instant access to some of the most fortified regions of Windows.
It turns out, however, that Windows was not properly downloading and applying updates to the driver blocklist, leaving users vulnerable to new BYOVD attacks.
As attacks surge, Microsoft countermeasures languish
Drivers typically allow computers to work with printers, cameras, or other peripheral devices—or to do other things such as provide analytics about the functioning of computer hardware. For many drivers to work, they need a direct pipeline into the kernel, the core of an operating system where the most sensitive code resides. For this reason, Microsoft heavily fortifies the kernel and requires all drivers to be digitally signed with a certificate that verifies they have been inspected and come from a trusted source.
Even then, however, legitimate drivers sometimes contain memory corruption vulnerabilities or other serious flaws that, when exploited, allow hackers to funnel their malicious code directly into the kernel. Even after a developer patches the vulnerability, the old, buggy drivers remain excellent candidates for BYOVD attacks because they’re already signed. By adding this kind of driver to the execution flow of a malware attack, hackers can save weeks of development and testing time.
BYOVD has been a fact of life for at least a decade. Malware dubbed “Slingshot” employed BYOVD since at least 2012, and other early entrants to the BYOVD scene included LoJax, InvisiMole, and RobbinHood.
Over the past couple of years, we have seen a rash of new BYOVD attacks. One such attack late last year was carried out by the North Korean government-backed Lazarus group. It used a decommissioned Dell driver with a high-severity vulnerability to target an employee of an aerospace company in the Netherlands and a political journalist in Belgium.
In a separate BYOVD attack a few months ago, cybercriminals installed the BlackByte ransomware by installing and then exploiting a buggy driver for Micro-Star’s MSI AfterBurner 4.6.2.15658, a widely used graphics card overclocking utility.
In July, a ransomware threat group installed the driver mhyprot2.sys—a deprecated anti-cheat driver used by the wildly popular game Genshin Impact—during targeted attacks that went on to exploit a code execution vulnerability in the driver to burrow further into Windows.
A month earlier, criminals spreading the AvosLocker ransomware likewise abused the vulnerable Avast anti-rootkit driver aswarpot.sys to bypass virus scanning.
Entire blog posts have been devoted to enumerating the growing instances of BYOVD attacks, with this post from security firm Eclypsium and this one from ESET among the most notable.
Microsoft is acutely aware of the BYOVD threat and has been working on defenses to stop these attacks, mainly by creating mechanisms to stop Windows from loading signed-but-vulnerable drivers. The most common mechanism for driver blocking uses a combination of what’s called memory integrity and HVCI, short for Hypervisor-Protected Code Integrity. A separate mechanism for preventing bad drivers from being written to disk is known as ASR, or Attack Surface Reduction.
Unfortunately, neither approach seems to have worked as well as intended.
Potent alpaca nanobodies neutralize SARS-CoV-2 variants
Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have developed a novel strategy for identifying potent miniature antibodies, so-called nanobodies, against emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants. The approach led to the discovery of multiple nanobodies that in cell cultures and mice effectively blocked infection with different SARS-CoV-2 variants. The findings, which are described in the journals Nature Communications and Science Advances, could pave the way for new treatments against COVID-19.
“With the help of advanced laboratory techniques, we were able to identify a panel of nanobodies that very effectively neutralized several variants of SARS-CoV-2,” says Gerald McInerney, professor at the Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology (MTC), Karolinska Institutet, and joint senior author of both studies.
Despite the roll-out of vaccines and antivirals, the need for effective therapeutics against severe COVID-19 infection remains high. Nanobodies—which are fragments of antibodies that occur naturally in camelids and can be adapted for humans—are promising therapeutic candidates as they offer several advantages over conventional antibodies. For example, they have favorable biochemical properties and are easy to produce cost-effectively at scale.
In the now published studies, the labs of Gerald McInerney and Ben Murrell, also at MTC, identify several potent nanobodies derived from an alpaca immunized with SARS-CoV-2 antigens.
The first report in Nature Communications describes a single nanobody, Fu2 (named after the alpaca Funny), that significantly reduced the viral load of SARS-CoV-2 in cell cultures and mice. Using electron cryo-microscopy, the researchers found that Fu2 naturally binds to two separate sites on the viral spike, thus inhibiting the virus’ ability to enter the host cell. This part of the study was conducted in collaboration with Hrishikesh Das and Martin Hällberg at the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology at Karolinska Institutet.
The researchers next delved deeper into the alpaca’s nanobody repertoire by combining a range of advanced laboratory techniques and computational methods, resulting in a library of nanobodies described in detail.
The results, presented in Science Advances, revealed additional nanobodies that in cell cultures and mice effectively cross-neutralized both the founder and beta variant of SARS-CoV-2 and even neutralized the more distantly related SARS-CoV-1.
“These nanobodies represent promising therapeutic candidates against several SARS-CoV-2 variants,” says first author Leo Hanke, a postdoctoral researcher who established the nanobody technology in the McInerney group.
The researchers are currently applying the same techniques to identify which nanobodies from this set are best able to neutralize omicron, the now dominating SARS-CoV-2 variant.
“Once established, these libraries can be expanded and mined for nanobodies that neutralize new emerging variants,” says Assistant Professor Ben Murrell, also joint senior author of both studies.
Researchers identify nanobody that may prevent COVID-19 infection
More information:
Leo Hanke et al, A bispecific monomeric nanobody induces spike trimer dimers and neutralizes SARS-CoV-2 in vivo, Nature Communications (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-27610-z
Leo Hanke et al, A bispecific monomeric nanobody induces spike trimer dimers and neutralizes SARS-CoV-2 in vivo, Nature Communications (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-27610-z
Leo Hanke et al, Multivariate mining of an alpaca immune repertoire identifies potent cross-neutralising SARS-CoV-2 nanobodies, Science Advances (2022). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abm0220. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abm0220
Provided by
Karolinska Institutet
Karolinska Institutet
Citation:
Potent alpaca nanobodies neutralize SARS-CoV-2 variants (2022, March 25)
retrieved 26 March 2022
from https://phys.org/news/2022-03-potent-alpaca-nanobodies-neutralize-sars-cov-.html
This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.
DDoSers are using a potent new method to deliver attacks of unthinkable size
Last August, academic researchers discovered a potent new method for knocking sites offline: a fleet of misconfigured servers more than 100,000 strong that can amplify floods of junk data to once-unthinkable sizes. These attacks, in many cases, could result in an infinite routing loop that causes a self-perpetuating flood of traffic. Now, content-delivery network Akamai says attackers are exploiting the servers to target sites in the banking, travel, gaming, media, and web-hosting industries.
These servers—known as middleboxes—are deployed by nation-states such as China to censor restricted content and by large organizations to block sites pushing porn, gambling, and pirated downloads. The servers fail to follow transmission control protocol specifications that require a three-way handshake—comprising an SYN packet sent by the client, a SYN+ACK response from the server, followed by a confirmation ACK packet from the client—before a connection is established.
This handshake limits the TCP-based app from being abused as amplifiers because the ACK confirmation must come from the gaming company or other target rather than an attacker spoofing the target’s IP address. But given the need to handle asymmetric routing, in which the middlebox can monitor packets delivered from the client but not the final destination that’s being censored or blocked, many such servers drop the requirement by design.
A hidden arsenal
Last August, researchers at the University of Maryland and the University of Colorado at Boulder published research showing that there were hundreds of thousands of middleboxes that had the potential to deliver some of the most crippling distributed denial of service attacks ever seen.
For decades, people have used DDoSes to flood sites with more traffic or computational requests than the sites can handle, denying services to legitimate users. DDoSes are similar to the old prank of directing more calls to the pizza parlor than the parlor has phone lines to handle.
To maximize the damage and conserve resources, DDoSers often increase the firepower of their attacks though amplification vectors. Amplification works by spoofing the target’s IP address and bouncing a relatively small amount of data at a misconfigured server used for resolving domain names, syncing computer clocks, or speeding up database caching. Because the response the servers automatically send are dozens, hundreds, or thousands of times bigger than the request, the response overwhelms the spoofed target.
The researchers said that at least 100,000 of the middleboxes they identified exceeded the amplification factors from DNS servers (about 54x) and Network Time Protocol servers (about 556x). The researchers said that they identified hundreds of servers that amplified traffic at a higher multiplier than misconfigured servers using memcached, a database caching system for speeding up websites that can increase traffic volume by an astounding 51,000x.
Here’s an overview of how the attacks work:
Day of reckoning
The researchers said at the time that they had no evidence of middlebox DDoS amplification attacks being used actively in the wild but expected it would only be a matter of time until that happened.
On Tuesday, Akamai researchers reported that day has come. Over the past week, the Akamai researchers said, they have detected multiple DDoSes that used middleboxes precisely the way the academic researchers predicted. The attacks peaked at 11Gbps and 1.5 million packets per second.
While small when compared to the biggest DDoSes, both teams of researchers expect the attacks to get larger as DDoSers begin to optimize their attacks and identify more middleboxes that can be abused (the academic researchers didn’t release that data to prevent it from being abused).
Kevin Bock, the lead researcher behind last August’s research paper, said DDoSers had plenty of incentives to reproduce the attacks his team theorized.
“Unfortunately, we weren’t surprised,” he told me upon learning of the active attacks. “We expected that it was only a matter of time until these attacks were being carried out in the wild because they are easy and highly effective. Perhaps worst of all, the attacks are new; as a result, many operators do not yet have defenses in place, which makes it that much more enticing to attackers.”
One of the middleboxes received a SYN packet with a 33-byte payload and responded with a 2,156-byte reply.
Akamai
That translated to a factor of 65x, but the amplification has the potential to be much greater with more work.
Akamai researchers wrote:
Volumetric TCP attacks previously required an attacker to have access to a lot of machines and a lot of bandwidth, normally an arena reserved for very beefy machines with high-bandwidth connections and source spoofing capabilities or botnets. This is because until now there wasn’t a significant amplification attack for the TCP protocol; a small amount of amplification was possible, but it was considered almost negligible, or at the very least subpar and ineffectual when compared with the UDP alternatives.
If you wanted to marry a SYN flood with a volumetric attack, you would need to push a 1:1 ratio of bandwidth out to the victim, usually in the form of padded SYN packets. With the arrival of middlebox amplification, this long-held understanding of TCP attacks is no longer true. Now an attacker needs as little as 1/75th (in some cases) the amount of bandwidth from a volumetric standpoint, and because of quirks with some middlebox implementations, attackers get a SYN, ACK, or PSH+ACK flood for free.
Russian Buildup Near Ukraine Features Potent Weapons Systems, Well-Trained Troops
Russia’s enormous military buildup near Ukraine features some of its most potent weapon systems and provides the Kremlin with the means to attack Ukrainian forces from multiple directions, which likely would overstretch their defenses.
In its buildup, which has quickened in recent weeks, Russia has positioned forces on three sides of Ukraine: in Belarus, western Russia and Crimea and on naval vessels in the Black Sea. The forces include some of Russia’s best trained battalions, special forces and surface-to-surface missiles that could strike targets throughout Ukraine.
The more than 130,000 troops Russia has in the region are still too few to seize and occupy the entire country, according to U.S. assessments. Urban warfare would still be a challenge, military specialists said, as it was for Russian forces fighting in Chechnya more than a decade ago and for the U.S. and its partners in the Iraqi city of Mosul in their more recent struggle against Islamic State militants.
However, Russia’s deployments provide its commanders formidable advantages. They include the capability to make rapid thrusts toward Ukraine’s capital, seize swaths of territory, take command of the skies and blockade the country’s ports, current and former U.S. officials said.
“The advantages are very strong up front. They can move quickly and use artillery and missile systems with long-ranges and a high rate of fire to target military facilities, air defense and army units,” said Dara Massicot, an expert on the Russian military at the Rand Corp.
“But over time, the missions would become more complicated for them, like holding roads, securing terrain and cordoning off major cities. Urban warfare would be very manpower intensive, and they don’t train on that scale,” Ms. Massicot said.
Russia has amassed more than 130,000 troops near Ukraine, signaling to U.S. and NATO officials that an invasion could take place in coming days. The Russian forces vary widely in their function and many have been transported across the country. Here’s a detailed look at the threat:
Ground Forces: Brigades and Regiments
Made up of about 3,000 troops each, these brigades and regiments are the basic land forces of the Russian military. They include: Infantry, Tank and Special Forces, Airborne and Naval Infantry
Donbas Forces
About 35,000 to 40,000 troops, with possibly more added in recent weeks, these forces are a combination of local separatists and mercenaries. Roughly 10% are Russian nationals who command and provide logistical support.
Ground Force: Battalion Tactical Groups
With about 700 to 800 troops each, these units are generally manned by professional soldiers not conscripts. They are drawn from ground force brigades and regiments. These highly trained groups are likely to be the lead forces in an invasion.
Forces in Belarus
Belarusian military units began exercises with Russian ground forces last week near the Polish and Ukrainian borders. The U.S. and NATO warn these moves could be part of a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine or an attempt to tie down Ukrainian defenses in the northwest.
Where They Came From
These lines show where each battalion tactical group deployed from, showing how Russia has pulled together its invasion force from across the country….
…. including from as far away as Russia’s northern, southern and far eastern military districts.
Source: Dr. Phillip Karber, Potomac Foundation
For months, Biden administration officials said that if Russia attacks, the U.S. would expand its supply of weapons to Ukraine’s forces, as well as impose punishing economic sanctions. Sending supplies could effectively be foreclosed if Russian President
Vladimir Putin
orders a major invasion, which the White House has said could halt commercial transportation and sever communications.
On Sunday, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Russia has sharply accelerated its buildup and that an attack could come “essentially at any time.” Moscow has said it has no intention of invading Ukraine but could take retaliatory military measures against what Mr. Putin has called “unfriendly steps.”
Ukraine’s forces, which number some 260,000, have improved since 2014, when Russia annexed the Ukrainian region of Crimea and backed a separatist proxy force in Ukraine’s east. Since then, Ukrainian forces have benefited from U.S. and other Western advisers and increased support. Those forces, however, would be stretched thin if they had to defend against potential Russian attacks on multiple axes, military analysts said.
The best of Ukraine’s forces are positioned on the border of Donbas, where fighting against the Russian-supported separatists has been going on since 2014. Those Ukrainian forces, however, could be vulnerable to envelopment if Russian troops attacked from the north and the south.
The U.S. and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies have sent antitank weapons, Stinger air-defense missiles and other battlefield systems to Ukraine. Ukraine also has acquired Turkish-made drones, one of which it used in October to destroy a howitzer manned by Russian-backed separatists. Still, the arms shipments the U.S. and its partners have provided haven’t included sophisticated air defenses or antiship missiles, hampering Ukrainians’ ability to defend themselves against Russia’s more modern military.
Ben Hodges, a retired lieutenant general who served as the U.S. Army commander in Europe from 2014 to 2018, said that by surrounding Ukraine on three sides, the Kremlin may be trying to damage the country’s economy and undermine President
Volodymyr Zelensky’s
government while keeping its military options open. Already, some businesses are putting expansion plans on hold, the Dutch airline KLM has suspended flights, and U.S. military trainers have been withdrawn.
“Russian forces are like a boa constrictor around Ukraine,” Gen. Hodges said. “If the Kremlin can bring about a collapse, it won’t have to attack or worry about sanctions.”
Missile units currently within reach of Ukraine
Normal peacetime positions
Movement to current position
Combined range of units capable of hitting Ukraine
Missile units currently within reach of Ukraine
Normal peacetime positions
Movement to current position
Combined range of units capable of hitting Ukraine
Missile units within reach of Ukraine
Normal peacetime positions
Movement to current position
Combined range of units capable of hitting
Ukraine
Russian officials have said their forces in Belarus are conducting a joint exercise with that nation’s military while Russian naval maneuvers are being carried out in the Black Sea. Western analysts said the exercise in Belarus—where Russian artillery, multiple rocket systems, warplanes, missiles and reconnaissance drones have been deployed—provides Russian forces with an opportunity to fine-tune tactics and train for a potential attack.
“Currently there’s over 130,000 troops stationed at readiness or exercising—plus warplanes, plus ships into the Black Sea—on the borders of Ukraine, and that is an action that is not normal,” Ben Wallace, Britain’s defense secretary, said last week. “It is beyond normal exercising.”
“Russian forces are like a boa constrictor around Ukraine.”
At the forefront of Russia’s capabilities are battalion tactical groups that have been deployed close to Ukraine, including in Belarus, according to U.S. assessments. Those units, which generally number about 700 to 800 troops each, are manned by professional soldiers instead of conscripts. Built around mechanized infantry or tank battalions, they are reinforced with artillery, air defenses, electronic warfare and other units. The Biden administration told Congress earlier this month that 83 of the groups were poised near Ukraine. That number, U.S. officials said, has since increased
The battalion tactical groups are capable of fast maneuvering on open terrain, including a rush toward Kyiv, U.S. officials said, but are also too small to defend large areas. If a major attack is ordered, traditional Russian regiments and brigades would likely follow to consolidate gains, according to current and former officials. Russian helicopters, which have been observed moving toward the region, could also be used to insert airborne troops at road junctions and bridges, and to fire at Ukrainian reinforcements moving to the front.
Adding to Russia’s firepower are Iskander surface-to-surface missile brigades, whose deployments within range of Ukraine have tripled since October, according to Phillip Karber of the Potomac Foundation, a policy research organization. Along with Kalibr cruise missiles deployed on vessels in the Black Sea, the Iskander missiles could strike airfields, ammunition storage sites, air defenses, army bases and command centers throughout Ukraine. Russia could use bombers to fire air-launched cruise missiles.
If Russia attacks, Russian Su-35 fighters and the S-400 air defense systems that Moscow has deployed in Belarus and whose range extends well into Ukraine, would give the Russians an advantage in the skies.
“These systems will help Russia achieve air superiority over the Ukrainian Air Force within days of the start of a further invasion” and would also dissuade the U.S. and allied cargo and reconnaissance aircraft from operating in Ukrainian airspace, according to an assessment by military fellows at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank.
In amassing its forces, Russia has deployed units from far-flung bases near China in the nation’s far east, garrisons near Norway in the north and from installations in the south near Georgia and Azerbaijan, according to Western experts and accounts on social-media.
Warships have steamed to the Black Sea from Russia’s northern Arctic waters and the Baltic Sea, giving Moscow the capability to blockade Ukrainian ports. During maneuvers there they are carrying out missile firings in zones restricting shipping. Still, more Russian naval vessels have taken up positions in the Mediterranean.
An invasion could start with cyberattacks, electronic jamming and, the U.S. has repeatedly alleged, some sort of staged provocation.
Among Mr. Putin’s options are putting military pressure on Kyiv without entering the city and moving more Russian forces into separatist-controlled Donbas, said Philip Breedlove, a retired U.S. Air Force general who served as NATO commander from 2013 to 2016. They could also seize Ukraine’s southern coastline, which could enable the Russians to isolate the city of Mariupol and control the water supply that serves occupied Crimea, he said.
“He has built a set of tools that gives him distinct options, and those tools now are ready,” Gen. Breedlove said.
Write to Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com and Max Rust at max.rust@dowjones.com
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
COVID-19 boosters offer ‘potent’ protection against omicron, study says, recommending Pfizer and Moderna – USA TODAY
- COVID-19 boosters offer ‘potent’ protection against omicron, study says, recommending Pfizer and Moderna USA TODAY
- Protection from prior infection significantly reduced against Omicron Axios
- Booster dose of mRNA COVID-19 vaccine required for immune protection against Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2, says study Medical Xpress
- How effective are COVID-19 vaccines against the Omicron and Delta variants? News-Medical.Net
- Antibodies from infection or vaccine offer ‘robust’ protection from omicron, study says KOMO News
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Gout Medicine Could Also Battle COVID-19 – FDA Approved and Has Potent Antiviral Properties
As 
Ralph Tripp, GRA Eminent Scholar of Vaccine and Therapeutic Studies at the University of Georgia. Credit: UGA
“There’s really nothing out there to safely fight these viruses,” said Ralph Tripp, lead author of the study and GRA Eminent Scholar of Vaccine and Therapeutic Studies in UGA’s College of Veterinary Medicine. “This antiviral works for all
(function(d, s, id){
var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];
if (d.getElementById(id)) return;
js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;
js.src = "https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&version=v2.6";
fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);
}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));
Read original article here
Why the pandemic could make this year’s flu shot less potent
Once doors start opening again and people venture out without taking a year’s worth of Covid-19 precautions, it’s possible there could be new strains of the flu circulating that scientists didn’t anticipate, said Cody Meissner, an infectious disease specialist and pediatrician at Tufts Children’s Hospital who also serves on the FDA vaccine advisory panel. Without a strong enough vaccine, the pandemic-weary country could experience a severe flu season just as it emerges from fighting the coronavirus.
“We may have a combination of low public health measures at the population level with a low effectiveness vaccine. And then so you might have a raging flu season next year,” said Lawrence Gostin, a global health law professor at Georgetown University.
Concerns about the knock-on effects of the shockingly quiet flu season came to the fore earlier this month at a meeting of the Food and Drug Administration’s independent vaccine advisory committee. While experts suggested there are lessons to be learned from last year’s flu season that could help prevent high flu rates in future years, they also struggled to project what next winter could bring.
“What we asked them during that meeting was, ‘Has there ever been a moment like this one?’ Where there was very little flu circulating, which one can then make a judgement about what then happened the following year, but this really is unprecedented,” said Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the FDA vaccine advisory panel.
Influenza is already a tough virus to track, Gostin said, because it mutates more rapidly than other familiar viruses such as measles. The flu’s quick-change act creates multiple strains every year.
The process of predicting which flu strains will predominate in each flu season is a global effort. The World Health Organization gathers experts twice a year to forecast flu strains — once each for the Northern and Southern hemispheres — based on data collected by labs around the world. They include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is one of WHO’s six “collaborating centers” for flu research.
At the Northern Hemisphere meeting in February, experts review what strains are then circulating in the Southern Hemisphere as it approaches autumn — and use that information to interpret which strains might hit the northern part of the globe months later. In the United States, the FDA vaccine advisory committee reviews those recommendations and makes a final decision about the makeup of the flu vaccines the agency will license.
Kawsar Talaat, an assistant scientist at Johns Hopkins with an expertise in infectious disease, said that experts watch how the virus evolves over the course of the season and which strains are dominant towards the end of the season.
There are few precedents for the most recent U.S. flu season. The 2011-12 flu season set records for the lowest and shortest peak of flu, according to the CDC. The numbers for the last season are still just one-third the rate of the 2011-12 season, the agency reports.
That previous low year did not seem to lead to particularly bad flu season in 2012-13, Talaat said, adding that the vaccine effectiveness that year was in line with or better than most years. She said it is too early to know what the flu season next fall will look like or to predict what the likely effectiveness of the flu vaccine is.
“In 2011-2012, we had almost no flu season and so that happens from year to year. And then last year we had a three-pronged, three-peaks flu season which was also very unusual. So influenza biology is a fascinating topic,” Talaat said.
Offit said that the low levels of the virus this season still yielded enough circulation for the FDA advisory committee to pick strains for a vaccine and that he is not worried about the vaccine for next fall.
“The belief is that there was enough circulating virus to be able to pick what is likely to be the strains that are associated with next year’s flu outbreak,” Offit said.
Influenza was not the only winter respiratory virus to see low numbers this season. Rates of respiratory syncytial virus were also down, Offit said. The disappearance of winter respiratory viruses is causing health experts to wonder if the Covid-19 mitigation strategies could become a necessary tool to fight them off every year.
“I mean, could we reasonably in a winter month, wear masks just at least when we’re outside in large crowds?” Offit said. “Did we learn that or are we willing to, or are we comfortable having hundreds of 1000s of cases of hospitalizations for flu and 10s of 1000s deaths? I suspect the answer is B. We’re comfortable with that, we’re willing to have that even though we just learned, there’s a way to prevent it.”
People are ready for life to get back to normal, Gostin said, and Covid-19 pandemic fatigue could have people ditching masking and social distancing at just the right time for flu.
“Remember after the 1918 flu pandemic, most people don’t realize what happened when that was over. But what happened was the roaring ‘20s,” Gostin said. “People started congregating, mingling, hugging, kissing. All the things they missed. They crowded into theaters and stadiums and went back to church. That’s what’s likely to happen this fall and that makes the influenza virus very happy.”