Millions of doses of the flu vaccine — up to 168 million — will be available to protect people from the strains of the influenza virus that should be most common in the 2018-2019 flu season, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC says that, in recent years, being vaccinated has reduced the risk by about 40 percent of being hospitalized because of the flu. Still, about 900,000 people were hospitalized because of influenza, and about 80,000 people, including 180 children (most of them unvaccinated), died during the 2017-2018 flu season, the deadliest in decades.
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