Comment by dnautics

I mean I suspect that the flu pangenome was evolving "meta-capabilities" to evade the way that our flu vaccines are selected by the authorities, you can see, vaguely, a declining efficacy of the flu vaccine in the last 5 years pre-pandemic (admittedly this could also be noise, or it could also be a measurement artefact due to better tracking). However, we'll probably never know since the flu patterns totally got rekt these past two years, which means any large-scale evolutionary trends, if they existed, probably, got the reset button pushed on them.