How to stay healthy as cold, flu and COVID season returns to Mass.

This is Up Next. I'm Tiziana Dearing. September marks the start of fall, the start of school, and the start of cold and flu season. Dr. Ashish Jha joins us now with some insights into how to stay healthy. Dr. Jha served as the White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator in the Biden administration, and he's now Senior Fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center. Good morning. Good morning. Thanks for having me here. Great to have you back again. We're hearing that this could be a milder flu season than last year. I wonder how we know that. Yeah, so the bottom line is we don't always know, and that's why I don't love predictions like that. Some of the predictions happen because we look at how the virus is spreading in the southern hemisphere, and we make guesses that that'll be the virus that ends up here. But you know what we learn every year is the virus sometimes surprises us. Now, my understanding is that we basically—I'm going to use such lay terms here, Dr. Jha— we cook up a flu vaccine based kind of on what we think the strain is going to be, and then either we were right and it's relatively effective, or we were wrong and it isn't. Is A, is that correct? And B, if that's correct, what do we know about this year's batch of vaccines? Yeah, it is absolutely true that we make a guess in the spring, and I actually think we should work on trying to make better guesses. There is new technology that allows us to do that. And then sometimes it's a great match and sometimes it's not. But here's the part that's important. Even in years when it's not a great match, especially for high-risk people, getting vaccinated still reduces their risk of getting hospitalized and dying. So it may not prevent infection at the rate that we would like, but it's going to prevent those serious complications. So that's why even in years that we sort of think of as a miss, I still tell people, you got to get vaccinated, because what you really care about is not ending up in the hospital. I was texting this week with somebody who had a sore throat, and they said to me, I'm not really worried about COVID. If I have COVID, it'll go away. Should we be worried about COVID this year? I think it depends on who you are. I still worry about COVID for my elderly parents, for instance. People who are older, COVID still kills a lot of people who are in that age group. Do I worry about COVID for, let's say, my teenage kids? No. Do I worry about it for an average healthy middle-aged person? No. A COVID infection is probably a third or a quarter as deadly as a flu infection. COVID is really just not a major problem for healthy people. So then make the case, or don't, about why one should continue to be vaccinated for COVID every time a new one comes out every year. Well, I'll tell you what I tell my family. And by the way, this is not exactly aligned with what the CDC says, but I'll tell you what I recommend. For my family, again, my elderly parents, they're absolutely getting a COVID vaccine. Absolutely. I'm in my 50s. To me, I think I probably will get a COVID vaccine, but it's kind of a bit of a dealer's choice. My kids who are in their teens and 20s, I say to them, if you want to get a COVID vaccine, God bless, but you absolutely do not need to. And as you can imagine, being my kids and being tortured by vaccines, and I don't torture them, but I tell them what I need them to do, they generally are happy to get that choice. And they have actually in the last couple of years opted out, and I think I'm fine with that. So I don't think COVID vaccines are essential for everybody. They are absolutely essential for older people. What do you tell your kids about the flu vaccine? Oh, that's a different story. Every single person in my family gets a flu vaccine every year. I'll tell you why. We still have young people dying of flu. We had almost 300 children die of flu this past year. Almost all of them were unvaccinated. Every single person should get the flu vaccine. Every high-risk person should get the COVID vaccine. I want to switch gears now a little bit, Dr. Jha, to the measles. Yeah. Cases are up nationally, not so in Massachusetts. Very few cases, unlike other states. Thank goodness, yeah. Massachusetts is also not seeing a drop-off in vaccinations like in other states. Yeah. Should schools be concerned about the measles? Well, if their numbers start dropping, absolutely. Measles is the most transmissible virus known to humanity. Extraordinarily infectious. And the truth is there's a small number of kids who can't get vaccinated. A child, let's say, on chemo for cancer. For those kids, it is essential that everybody around them is vaccinated. And that's why I strongly support local school districts having a measles mandate or vaccine mandate, obviously with those health exceptions. But, yeah, schools have to be paying attention to this. That's Dr. Ashish Jha, who's at Harvard now. He's also CEO of the company BioRadar. He'll be speaking at the Boston Globe's Future of Medicine Summit tomorrow. But we got to talk to you today. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me here.