These days, there are more things that you can do at home by yourself that you couldn’t do before such as sit in a business meeting without wearing any pants. Well, here’s another thing that previously wasn’t possible at home but now is: vaccinating yourself against the flu. Yep, if you are in one of the 34 currently eligible states in the U.S., you may not be able to get the FluMist Home vaccine from AstraZeneca delivered right to your home. And in case you missed what FluMist is, it’s a nasal spray vaccine that can protect you against influenza. And everybody knows that squirting something up your nose could be easier than sticking yourself with a needle.
FluMist Home Was Approved By The FDA In September 2024
The vaccine itself isn’t new. The FluMist nasal spray vaccine first reached the market after it had received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval back in 2003 to be used for those from five to 49 years of age. The FDA added kids from two through five years of age to this approval in 2007. But until last year, like all other flu vaccines, you had to get some kind of qualified healthcare worker to give you the FluMist vaccine.
That all changed in September 2024 when the FDA approved FluMist to be the first self-administer-able flu vaccine out there. Not coincidentally, FluMist also is the only nasal spray flu vaccine out there. You could say that it was easier then to pick the nose as the first target for self-administration of the flu vaccine. When the FDA considers whether to approve a medical product for home use, it has to take into account all the possible ways that people may misuse or even abuse that product at home and what harms may result. And you can imagine that getting people to squirt something up their own noses in a safe manner may be a bit easier than getting people to use needles safely to inject themselves in their own arms.
Not surprisingly, the September 2024 FDA approval didn’t AstraZeneca enough time to ready the home version of FluMist, known as FluMist Home, for last flu season, which was a particularly nasty one, as I covered in Forbes at the time. But the company is raring to go for this upcoming flu season. Starting this fall, if you are an adult under 50 or a parent of a child who’s older than two you can order the vaccine via an online platform. Now you will have to complete a medical screening questionnaire that will be reviewed by a licensed healthcare professional before the vaccines gets prescribed to you or your tykes. Most types of commercial insurance should cover this vaccine. But you may have to fork out $8.99 for shipping and handling.
Here Are The Eligibility Criteria For FluMist
Now, if you are an adult who is 50 years or older or a kid from six months up to two years of age and saying WTF, as in “where’s the FluMist,” for you, you aren’t eligible for this vaccine. That’s because the vaccine uses live (but weakened) versions of the flu virus, which is different from the other flu vaccines that use dead or inactivated versions of the flu virus. The live, weakened versions of the flu virus may generate a stronger immune response in your respiratory tract and thus stronger protection than the dead versions would. However, if you’ve got a weaker immune systems such as when you get older than 50 or are younger than two years of age, then you want to be careful about getting a live virus, even if it is weakened, injected into you.
The 34 States Where You Can Get FluMist Home
Your access to FluMist Home does depend on the pharmacy laws in the state where you reside. For this upcoming 2025-2026 flu season, you will be able to order FluMist Home if you are in Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Idaho, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin or Wyoming. You may have “mist” out if you live in Alaska, Arkansas, DC, Delaware, Hawaii, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, Montana, Missouri, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Rhode Island or West Virginia, as those states do not currently permit home delivery and self-administration of the vaccine. This could change for the future flu seasons.
FluMist Home Could Help Increase Flu Vaccination Rates
The flu vaccine typically offers anywhere from 30% to 60% protection against the flu, depending on how well the flu strains in the flu vaccine match the circulating strains that year. Since it takes about six months to produce the flu vaccine, the selection of the strains for the vaccine need to occur well in advance of the flu season. That’s why sometimes it’s a good match, sometimes things are way off and often it’s somewhere in between.
As with many other vaccines against infectious diseases, how well you are protected against the flu does depend on how many other people around you got vaccinated as well. Last flu season, an estimated 46.7% of adults and 49.2% of children got vaccinated against the flu. That’s compared to 49.2% and 53.4% for the flu season prior in 2023-2024, according the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. These close-to-but-not-quite-half have been rather typical each flu season recently, as I have written in Forbes previously.
Those numbers ain’t great. You may have heard of the concept of herd immunity, which I have written about before in Forbes. While the flu vaccine will help protect the individuals who got it, ideally you want the vaccination coverage to be significantly higher than the herd immunity threshold for flu, which is around 50%. When the vaccination coverage is well above the herd immunity threshold, the virus begins to run out of susceptible people to infect, which in turn slows the spread of the flu virus in the population.
It’s not completely clear why over the half the U.S. population did not get the flu vaccine last flu season. For some, it might have been a matter of convenience. They may have not gotten vaccinated simply because they didn’t find the time to take off from work, school or whatever they do throughout the day to go to a clinic or pharmacy. For such folks, having something like FluMist Home available could increase their chances of getting vaccinated.
