What’s ahead for GPs this flu season?

Despite it being a ‘wait and watch’ to see which influenza strains will dominate Australia’s flu season, and how effective vaccines will be against them, experts say GPs are guaranteed to play a ‘critical’ role in vaccine uptake.
 
Off the back of Australia’s deadliest flu season this century, a group of experts have foreshadowed what’s ahead for the 2026 winter flu season.
 
Last year, influenza claimed the lives of more than 1700 Australians, and the nation saw a record-high half a million laboratory-confirmed cases.
 
But so far in 2026, case levels are tracking ‘really low’, said Professor Patrick Reading, Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza at the Doherty Institute.
 
Professor Reading said 2025 was impacted by a longer than usual flu season, fuelled by the ‘quite unusual’ emergence of a dominant sub-type, H3N2 subclade K.
 
‘In June, July and August we had a peak of h1 and n1 influenza activity. But from September and October onwards we saw an emergence and a dominance of a different sub-type. And this was quite unusual.
 
‘In other years, influenza dropped nicely as we moved into spring and summer. But last year it remained elevated.
 
‘The h1n1, and h3n2 components of the vaccine that’s available now in Australia have been updated, and this is to provide a better match for the circulating viruses that we’re expecting in our winter.’
 
However, Professor Reading said that despite the best planning – including giving vaccine manufacturers six months’ notice to prepare for what are anticipated to be the dominant strains – exactly what is to come is not clear.
 
‘We cannot predict the severity, or which virus or viruses will predominate in the upcoming influenza season,’ he said. ‘We kind of have to wait and watch.’
 
‘We don’t know what’s coming this winter, so let’s wait and see. But there should be a better match going forward if the K virus was to emerge in our winter season this year.’
 
At the end of April 2026, 28,582 cases of laboratory-confirmed influenza have been recorded in Australia, with New South Wales accounting for almost 10,000 cases.
 
Those aged 5–15 years and 15–50 years remain the least vaccinated cohorts, at 14.5% and 20.8% respectively.
 
Professor Kristine Macartney, Director of the Australian National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance, said people often underestimate how damaging flu can be, even to those beyond the usual at-risk cohorts.
 
‘As a clinician for more than 40 years, I can emphasise to you that people always say, “I had no idea”,’ she said.
 
Professor Macartney believes the half-million cases recorded in 2025 were ‘only the tip of the iceberg’.
 
‘There are many people who didn’t go to the doctor, didn’t get a test, didn’t get notified,’ she said.

The intranasal flu vaccine, now available to Australian children for the first time, is hoped to be a gamechanger for Australia, having been available in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom ‘for decades’, Professor Macartney said.
 
‘In fact, it is the backbone of a very comprehensive all-child influenza program in the UK,’ she said.
 
‘It’s just that it took a long time to get a southern hemisphere formulation manufactured.’
 
She said GPs are ‘a critical part of our health system’ that are in a position to help drive vaccination rates back up, particularly in the face of vaccine hesitation and parents not prioritising influenza vaccination for their children.
 
‘The greatest thing GPs … can do is take the time to both simply acknowledge and understand the concerns that parents or their patients may be having, but ensure that they can, succinctly and on the spot, access appropriate information and resources to support their decision making and to actually try and address some of their questions,’ she said.
 
This includes dispelling misconceptions planted by a social media post ‘seen for two seconds’.
 
‘There’s an increasing amount of this flooding in our lives, and all healthcare providers have a great ability to be able to take the time with their patients,’ Professor Macartney said.
 
‘It’s often a busy encounter, but we know that it’s critical for us as healthcare providers to do.’
 
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