Flunomics Report Highlights US Influenza Burden, Vaccine Gaps During 2024-2025 Season: Marco del Riccio, MD

Last month, Sanofi published the Flunomics report in collaboration with Marco del Riccio, MD, of the University of Florence in Italy. The report synthesized data to highlight the wide-ranging impact of influenza on individuals, health systems, and society worldwide, including in the US. This follows the CDC's classification of the 2024-2025 US influenza season as high severity for all groups, the first such designation since the 2017-2018 season.

In this clip, del Riccio expands on the motivations behind the Flunomics report, focusing on US data, and explains what made the 2024-2025 season particularly severe.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity; captions were auto-generated.

Transcript

What motivated the development of the Flunomics report, and what key gaps in understanding the influenza burden in the US were you aiming to address?

Basically, one of the main motivations is to highlight information gaps. We know influenza is driving the number of hospitalizations every year, in the Northern Hemisphere, every winter. That said, we know that vaccine coverage is suboptimal in all the risk groups for which the vaccine is recommended.

Yet, we know that the surveillance system is not perfect in capturing all cases. We know that it doesn't have to be perfect to give us better information, but it could be better, or we could use the better data that we do have.

We certainly need to do a little bit more in terms of, on one hand, leveraging the data we do have to estimate in calculations to understand the real impact of this disease. On the other hand, try to understand the gaps in terms of information that we're missing so that we can build on surveillance better, or calculate and estimate better, to better understand the impact of the disease.

The CDC classified the 2024-2025 influenza season as high severity for all age groups. What made this season stand out compared with prior severe seasons?

In terms of both cases, but most of all hospitalizations, the number of hospitalized people was higher than in previous seasons. If I'm not mistaken, an estimated more than half a million people in the US were hospitalized, which is a huge number in general, but also compared to the previous seasons.

Taking this into consideration and matching it with the fact that we had suboptimal use of the preventive tools really makes us wonder how we can do better, not only in terms of influenza prevention for individuals but also to reduce the burden of this disease in terms of public health for a country, the US in this case.