Flu Cases Surge as Experts Warn of Inequities (Full Transcript)

[00:00:01] Speaker 1: So, I owe my colleagues, Polo Sandoval and Manu Raju, a big thank you. Gentlemen, thank you. If you watched last Sunday morning, 6 to 8 a.m., I typically also anchor that show. But on Sunday, you saw them holding it down for me. That's because I was down bad. I mean, I was at home, in bed, shivering and sweating because of the flu. I'm fine now. I'm upright, as my great-grandmother used to say, kicking but not high. At one point, I ran a 103-degree fever, the worst I have felt in my life. I was a mess, and I'm not alone. I was dealing with something you're either dealing with yourself right now, or you have dealt with recently, or you know someone who is, because right now, across the country, flu cases are surging. The U.S. has not seen this level of flu in 25 years. What's concerning doctors is not just the number of cases, though. It's also what the Trump administration is or is not doing about it. Just this week, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services scaled back the number of vaccines broadly recommended for children. Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was asked about that in the context of the flu. We're not taking vaccines away from anybody.

[00:01:21] Speaker 2: But it is more difficult now for parents to get their children immunized for the flu, right? They can't just go to a pharmacy.

[00:01:27] Speaker 3: You need to do a shared decision-making with your physician, which is how it would be. Fewer people will get the flu vaccine. Well, that may be, and maybe that's a better thing.

[00:01:38] Speaker 1: Dr. Christie Purnell is with us. She's a public health physician and director of the NAACP Center for Health Equity. Good morning to you. What do we need to know? Let's start broadly about the flu and racial disparities, because you know there is that old adage, when America catches a cold, black people especially get the flu. What do we need to know about the numbers and severity?

[00:02:05] Speaker 4: Well, good morning, Victor, and I'm glad you are feeling better. We want to make sure you are healthy and thriving and kicking higher. But unfortunately, as you just mentioned, because of the inequities that we see across American healthcare, and more broadly across American society, historically marginalized populations like black and African-American communities, because of systemic racism, which has fueled broken trust between those communities and the healthcare system, less healthcare access. They may not have health insurance where they can go to a physician or certain medications are covered, and there may be other socioeconomic barriers. Less availability of time to see a physician or to report to get evaluation when experiencing symptoms. And bottom line, what we see in black and African-American communities, lower vaccination rates as compared to white Americans. If roughly half of white Americans are vaccinated against the flu, that number could be about 42% in black and African-Americans, and even lower in the Hispanic and Latino population. So indeed, unfortunately, when others get a cold, black people do get the flu.

[00:03:18] Speaker 1: I was able to start Tamiflu, and it works best when it's started within the first 48 hours of the onset of symptoms. And I was able to start in that window, but that required first taking the test, getting a positive test, and then getting in day one, an appointment with a doctor. So that requires the insurance, the doctor, maybe a concierge service, an app, which requires money. How much does the disparity of resources, independent of race, but the disparity of resources, impact the disparity of the hospitalizations and the severities?

[00:03:58] Speaker 4: Yeah, and let me say it to you this way, because I just said this when talking about black maternal mortality. It is not that race is a risk factor. It is that racism is the risk factor, because it is a systemic structural determinant of how resources are organized in communities. Whether or not you have access to a job that pays a living wage, whether or not your job has employer-provided insurance, whether or not you can take time off to go to the doctor if you have a federal insurance program, whether or not you have other responsibilities that allow you to take the time out to take care of yourself. And we know that just racism in and of itself is a toxicity. It is a toxic stressor on those communities that live under the threat of discrimination night and day. One other fact that I think is important for the public to know, black and African-American populations and other historically groups not only have disparities around vaccination and experiencing the flu, but they tend to experience the flu at younger ages and to have more severe cases because of the reasons we just discussed.

[00:05:03] Speaker 1: The high-dose vaccine is recommended for most seniors because they're more vulnerable. NIH published a study in 2023 that followed 11.7 Medicare recipients. So these are people 65 and over. They have medical coverage. Even when black seniors with coverage went to get the shot, they were less likely to receive it compared to white beneficiaries in almost every state. So this is not just about access. It's about once you get to your medical professional, how you are treated.

[00:05:34] Speaker 4: Definitely. We talk about this a lot in health care. I call it socially and culturally fluent care. Does your provider, whether that is a physician, physician's assistant, or even a nurse practitioner, do they give you the most effective counseling because whether or not they believe that you are likely to follow it or are your symptoms validated? We see this, whether it is people presenting to the emergency department who have pain, whether or not they are properly prescribed pain medications. Just recently in textbooks, it was still saying the falsehood that black people had thicker skin so that they did not sense pain the same as white people. That's when I'm talking about systemic racism where discrimination and bias, unfortunately, have been cooked into the system.

[00:06:21] Speaker 1: Dr. Chris T. Purnell, thank you for helping us understand some of the work still that needs to be done.

[00:06:28] Speaker 3: And now to brand new data on the flu. After a record week of flu activity in the U.S., hospitalizations and deaths continue to rise. CNN's Meg Terrell has details.

[00:06:42] Speaker 2: Flu activity is still elevated across the United States. In the most recent update from the CDC, we do see that activity possibly may be coming down a little bit. But the CDC warns it's not clear that the season has peaked yet because those declines could be potentially due to delayed holiday reporting. What we do see is that hospitalizations are still rising from the flu. Forty-four jurisdictions are currently reporting high or very high levels of flu activity, with five reporting moderate levels of flu activity. The CDC has said that this is a moderately severe flu season. Of course, we know that there is a lot of additional activity because there is a new strain of the flu known as subclade K that's been identified. And it arose in the United States after the flu vaccine had already been designed. So there was a bit of a mismatch between the flu vaccine and that strain. However, experts point out, and some data have shown, that the flu vaccine still does provide protection against the flu, particularly against severe disease. And so experts are still recommending that folks who haven't been vaccinated can still benefit from getting a flu shot. The CDC estimates that so far this season there have been 15 million illnesses with the flu, 180,000 hospitalizations and 7,400 deaths. We also saw in the most recent data from the CDC an additional eight pediatric deaths from the flu, bringing the total so far this season to 17. The CDC says elevated flu activity is expected at least for several more weeks. Of course, flu isn't the only respiratory virus going around this time of year. We are also seeing activity levels rising for RSV, respiratory syncytial virus, and COVID-19 as well. Although if you look at hospitalizations for those three different respiratory viruses, by far, flu is contributing the most to that severe level of disease. So folks are saying be careful out there, get vaccinated if you haven't been. Antivirals are available, of course, for flu and for COVID. So getting tested early in the course of the illness is always recommended.

[00:08:44] Speaker 3: All right. All great advice. Dr. Terrell, thank you so much.