Families Fighting Flu is marking 20 years of advocacy and education about the importance of flu vaccines.
We all know the symptoms — fever, cough, chills, and body aches. If you’ve ever experienced or heard the symptoms from a loved one and thought, “It’s just the flu,” members of Families Fighting Flu (FFF) have a message for you: The flu can be deadly. They know that fact all too well, having either lost a loved one to the disease or experienced long-term medical consequences as a result.
Founded in 2004 by a small group of grieving parents, Families Fighting Flu seeks to educate about the seriousness of influenza and the importance of vaccination. Joe Lastinger of Texas, one of the founding board members, lost his 3-year-old daughter, Emily, to the flu. At the time, young children were not recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to get the flu shot — Families Fighting Flu was integral in changing that.
“When the original group of families came together and realized there was a vaccine that could have prevented our kids from getting sick, we knew we had to act,” Lastinger said. “We went to the CDC, we testified in front of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, and we told our stories. The change in the age recommendation was incremental, and we didn’t stop until we got to the universal flu vaccine recommendation.”
Underwhelming vaccination rates
In 2010, the CDC established that virtually everyone aged 6 months and older should get a universal flu vaccine. That guidance remains in place today.
Despite that widespread recommendation, vaccine rates for influenza remain low. During the 2023-24 flu season, less than 50% of U.S. adults received the vaccine. The pandemic didn’t help those numbers. Even more concerning is that the vaccination rate for pregnant persons was only 36.7% in the 2023-24 season.
FFF focuses much of its attention on making vaccines more accessible, educating people on the seriousness of flu, and helping to remove other roadblocks that prevent people from protecting themselves, their families, and their communities.
“Each of our families shares their stories in the hopes of bringing understanding to why flu vaccines should be an annual priority,” Gary Stein said, Families Fighting Flu board president. “Many of our survivor families live with the guilt that they didn’t make the flu shot a priority, that it just fell off the radar that year. That is a regret that no one should have to live with.”
Flu testing and treatments
The similarity in the symptoms of the flu, COVID-19, RSV, and the common cold has also prompted a new focus for FFF — the testing and treating of all viruses.
“Having accurate tests that give me a diagnosis that I can build a treatment plan off of has been a game changer,” says Dr. Jeb Teichman, a retired pediatrician and FFF’s chief medical officer, who lost his 29-year-old son to the flu in 2019. “We’ve got to get people to realize these symptoms could be serious, but with proper testing, you can get on a treatment that could make the difference between life and death.”
Making testing and appropriate treatments more widely known and available across the United States is a goal for FFF. The organization is also finding new and creative ways to spread its message. These include partnering with the National Grange to bring vaccine clinics to agricultural fairs as well as working with other partners to make vaccines available to people in places you might not expect, such as the Montgomery County Immunization Coalition’s “Say Boo to the Flu at the Zoo” event this October.
“We want to meet people where they are to educate them about the flu,” says Michele Slafkosky, executive director of FFF. “We are very much a family inside this organization, but we don’t want this family to grow any larger. We want to increase the number of flu vaccinations and reduce flu-related hospitalizations and deaths.”
