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Although the report supported getting flu shots, it said that new vaccines offering lifelong protection against all flu strains, instead of annual partial protection against a mix-and-match set, must be created.

“Vaccine effectiveness” is a very different metric from vaccine-virus match, which is done in a lab. Vaccine efficacy is measured by interviewing hundreds of sick or recovering patients who had positive flu tests and asking whether and when they had received shots.

During the 2009 swine flu pandemic, many elderly Americans had natural protection, presumably from flus they caught in the 1930s or ’40s.

If you ask the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, this year’s flu season is looking “moderately severe.”

if you ask Google Flu Trends, we’re in the midst of an outbreak that is shaping up to be the most extensive on record.

CDC still drives the bulk of national media coverage

Fauci is more excited about something called a recombinant protein vaccine, which does not rely on growing viruses, even though it is cell-based. At Protein Sciences, a small Connecticut biotech firm, researchers isolate the gene for the flu virus’s surface proteins and insert it into an entirely different species of virus, called a baculovirus. The baculovirus infects insect cells and causes them to make huge amounts of the surface proteins, which the company uses to make Flublok, the only recombinant protein flu vaccine currently available.

The researchers have tried various methods, including the same one used to make Flublok—insect cells churning out surface proteins.

“The eggs should be long gone,” grumbles Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

The CDC’s current estimates aren’t all that current.

That’s where Google comes in.

the numbers can tell us only how many people were suffering from the flu a couple weeks ago.

Also, Protein Sciences Corp. of Meriden, Conn., landed a five-year, $147 million contract to develop a vaccine using its recombinant technology — flu proteins grown in insect cells. The hope is that the first doses would be available within 12 weeks of the beginning of a pandemic. That is about twice as fast as flu vaccine produced from eggs.

“I say, ‘Use this vaccine,’ ” he said. “The safety profile is actually quite good. But we have oversold it. Use it — but just know it’s not going to work nearly as well as everyone says.”

“Not having evidence doesn’t prove it doesn’t work; we just don’t know,” said Dr. Roger Thomas, a Cochrane Collaboration coordinator for the University of Calgary in Alberta, who was an author of both of the reviews. “The intelligent decision would be to have large, publicly funded independent trials.”

“Does it work as well as the measles vaccine? No, and it’s not likely to. But the vaccine works,” Dr. Joseph Bresee, chief of epidemiology and prevention in the C.D.C.’s influenza division, said. And research is advancing to improve the effectiveness of the vaccine.

Influenza A and B viruses can persist on both nonporous and porous environmental surfaces for hours to days depending on a variety of human and environmental factors.