H3N2 Influenza A variant in 2025-2026 more virulent

[Astronuc]

Experts predict this year's flu season to be worse than usual—here's why​

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/experts-predict-years-flu-season-120000811.html

“We will have a significant flu season this year, and we have a lot of concern that it's going to be more severe than typical,” says Richard Martinello, an infectious diseases specialist and chief medical officer at Yale Medicine.

Why? The version of the virus that’s circulating around the globe has undergone significant genetic changes that make it easier to infect people, and therefore to spread between them. It means “our antibodies won’t see it as well,” says Danuta Skowronski, a physician-epidemiologist and flu researcher at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control, who first flagged the mutations in the Journal of the Association of Medical Microbiology and Infectious Disease Canada in October. What’s worse, these genetic changes happened too late to account for in flu shot formulations.

Eventually, this version, dubbed subclade K, circles the globe. “There's a ping-pong effect between Northern and Southern Hemisphere flu seasons,” says Marcus Pereira, an infectious diseases physician who specializes in immunocompromised patients at New York’s Columbia University Irving Medical Center. “Whatever is there eventually makes it way up to us, and vice versa.”

Emergence of seasonal influenza A(H3N2) variants with immune escape potential warrants enhanced molecular and epidemiological surveillance for the 2025–2026 season​

https://utppublishing.com/doi/10.3138/jammi-2025-0025


Once can search on H3N2 on PF and find other threads on this particular virus.

Also - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H3N2