Get a jab, or a mask, to keep your loved ones safe from flu

I wouldn't want to sound smugger than I usually do, but I got my flu vaccination many weeks ago, just as I did with my Covid booster.

- SEAN O'GRADY

I am a walking antivaxxer's nightmare.

As we contemplate our Christmas reunions, office parties, and school nativity plays getting cancelled by a microorganism, we are divided into the “have-shots” and the “have-nots”. When the dreaded question is asked by way of small talk, but also a casual method of social segregation, “Have you had your jab?” I am happy to reply, “Yes, on the first day it was available.”

As I say, smug, even if the conspiracy theorists think that I am succumbing to government thought control, or something. “Sheeple” or not, my compliance with public health advice means I now feel reasonably well protected as we go into what seems like an unusually disruptive flu season. Aside from Covid, which is sadly never going to go away, and the “vomiting bug”, we’re now being assailed as never before by the flu, and specifically the H3N2 flu variant, or “the nasty one” – as we scientists like to term it.