The Wright Center – “Prioritize Vaccine as Peak Flu Season Approaches”

William Dempsey, M.D., serves as chief population health value-based care officer for The Wright Center. He provides comprehensive whole-person primary health services as a board-certified family medicine physician and serves as medical director at The Wright Center for Community Health Clarks Summit.

It’s great that we’re now fully into the holiday season. Not so great – ‘tis also the season for highly contagious respiratory illnesses.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I can’t implore you enough to go out and get up to speed on your flu vaccination. It’s safe, it works, and it will keep you and your loved ones from getting sick.

As it happens, this week is National Influenza Vaccination Week (Dec. 2-6). Coordinated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the annual observance serves as a helpful reminder to people that there’s still time to get your flu shot this season.

Flu season usually begins around late September or early October, which is actually the ideal time to get vaccinated. From there, it increasingly accelerates until it peaks between December and February. In some years, infections can even occur as late as May.

Flu symptoms typically surface within a couple of days, and the virus shares many of the same effects as COVID, including fever, chills, dry cough, body aches, headaches, stuffy/runny nose, shortness of breath, and fatigue.

The best thing you can do to protect yourself from the flu – and minimize its symptoms if you do contract it – is to get the annual flu shot, which allows protective antibodies to develop in your body within two weeks or so of vaccination.

The flu vaccine is available to anyone ages 6 months and older, and CDC studies have shown that vaccination reduces the risk of contracting the illness by about 40% to 60% among the general public. For the 2024-2025 flu season, all vaccines in the United States are “trivalent” vaccines, meaning they protect against three different influenza viruses: an influenza A(H1N1) virus, an influenza A(H3N2) virus, and an influenza B/Victoria virus.

For certain vulnerable populations, vaccination is especially critical given the risk of severe illness, hospitalization, and even death. Among those people are pregnant women, young children, adults ages 65 and older, and those with serious health conditions like cancer, heart disease, HIV/AIDS, diabetes, asthma, and kidney disease. Every year, thousands of children are hospitalized with severe flu, according to the CDC.

We at The Wright Center for Community Health take flu vaccinations very seriously. We’re now providing flu shots at all of our locations throughout Northeast Pennsylvania. To schedule an office visit that includes vaccination, call 570-230-0019 or go online to use the express scheduling system at TheWrightCenter.org.

I should also mention that many local pharmacies offer free flu shots to insured customers, and numerous local employers provide flu vaccinations as a free service to their workers.

The holidays are a wonderful time, and you certainly don’t want a case of the flu to upend your fun plans.  So, get your flu shot – it’s safe, effective, readily available, and one of the best gifts you can give yourself and others this season.