People Who Got a Flu Vaccine 27 Percent More Likely To Get the Virus, Study Finds

A new large-scale study conducted by the Cleveland Clinic on the effectiveness of the 2024–2025 influenza vaccine shows that those who took the shot had a 27 percent higher risk of infection compared to those who skipped the jab.Contrary to public health assurances — not to mention the advice of doctors and TV ads by large pharmaceutical companies — the findings suggest the vaccine may not only lack effectiveness but could actually increase the risk of influenza infection. The research, led by Dr. Nabin Shrestha, analyzed data from more than 53,000 employees in Cleveland Clinic’s Ohio facilities during the 2024–2025 respiratory viral season. The goal was to evaluate the vaccine’s real-world performance in protecting against laboratory-confirmed influenza. Participants included relatively healthy, working-age adults, offering a focused lens on vaccine impact in a healthcare setting. Of the employees analyzed, 82.1 percent received the influenza vaccine. However, the study found that the cumulative incidence of influenza infections was higher in vaccinated individuals compared to those unvaccinated. Over the 25-week study period, 1,079 confirmed cases of influenza — primarily caused by influenza A — were recorded. In the study’s medical language, the researchers wrote: “In an analysis adjusted for age, sex, clinical nursing job, and employment location, the risk of influenza was significantly higher for the vaccinated compared to the unvaccinated state (HR, 1.27; 95 percent C.I., 1.07 – 1.51; P = 0.007), yielding a calculated vaccine effectiveness of −26.9 percent (95 percent C.I., −55.0 to −6.6 percent).”That means vaccinated individuals had a 27 percent higher risk of infection compared to unvaccinated employees. Dr. Shrestha and his team emphasized that these findings could not be dismissed as a statistical anomaly. The analysis, enriched through time-dependent methods and adjusted models, consistently showed this troubling pattern. “No protective effect emerged at any point,” the researchers noted. The study raises critical questions about this year’s flu vaccine formulation, including the possibility of “strain mismatches” and immune interference. It also challenges broader public health messaging about the benefits of the annual flu vaccine, particularly in years of poor strain selection. “The negative vaccine effectiveness figure — suggesting harm rather than protection — contradicts public health messaging and raises serious questions about strain mismatch, immune interference, or potential vaccine-related susceptibility,” the researchers said. However, the study does have limitations, the researchers noted. It focused exclusively on the inactivated trivalent flu vaccine, which accounted for 99 percent of the vaccinations among participants. The effectiveness of alternative options such as quadrivalent or live-attenuated vaccines was not analyzed. In addition, flu-related hospitalizations or deaths were too infrequent to assess, and the study could not capture cases diagnosed outside the Cleveland Clinic system. Despite these limitations, Dr. Shrestha said, “The data were robust enough to reject the common defense that odds ratios from ‘test-negative’ studies exaggerate protection—because here, direct risk was measured.”

People Who Got a Flu Vaccine 27 Percent More Likely To Get the Virus, Study Finds

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