A new Cleveland Clinic study that was carried out in the United States through the flu vaccine has aroused the interest of vaccine skeptics and pressed questions and concerns about the safety of the vaccine.
“Get the flu shot and you are 27% more likely that you will get the flu!” Read a post on April 7, in which a Preprint study published on April 4.
🚨🚨 Breaking: Get the flu shot and you are 27% more likely to get the flu !!!!
Just like the Covid bumps and pretty much any other “vaccine”, it seems that the flu vaccination is a bitter failure. In a preprint study by the Cleveland Clinic, employees who received the flu vaccination had 27%… pic.twitter.com/w70bvf3wa3
– Tom Renz (@Renztom) April 7, 2025
The next day, another X -Post messages were driven by the study with the call to act: “All flu ‘vaccines” have to be pulled out of the market until large prospective studies on their security and effectiveness. “
The warnings cite an article by researchers of Cleveland Clinic Researchers not examined by Peer with the title Effective of the influenza vaccine during the Respiratory Virus season 2024-2025. It was published on April 4 on the Preprint server Medrxiv, which contains font at the top of the fat that “reports new medical research that still needs to be evaluated and should therefore not be used to provide clinical practice”.
What the study says – and what it doesn’t do
The study comprised 53,402 employees of the Clinic Health Systems in Ohio and found that the vaccinated participants had a higher infection in the latest flu season. However, a spokesman for Cleveland Clinic said it was misleading to use the study to draw wider conclusions about vaccines and susceptibility to infections.
“The data did not come from a relatively healthy population of around 50,000 health workers and did not represent the general population,” said Andrea Pacetti, spokesman for Cleveland Clinic.
The flu vaccine helps to prevent flu cases from becoming more serious and hospitalization. Every year the vaccines of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the associated biological products decide which viruses are to be used for the flu vaccine of the coming season. Data collected by the FDA, the World Health Organization, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other partners through which flu strains around the world are in circulation provide information. (The session of the committee to discuss the influenza vaccine trunks for the 2025-2026 influenza season was canceled.)
According to the CDC, in which the strains of the flu and the circulation flu match, it was shown that the vaccine “reduces the risk of going to the doctor by flu by 40% to 60%”.
Robert Hopkins Jr., the medical director of the National Foundation for InfectIous Diseases, said that the Cleveland Clinic study does not evaluate the main benefit for vaccination against influenza: the risk of serious illnesses, hospital stays and death.
“People should be aware that the effectiveness of flu vaccine varies from year to year, but even if the vaccination of the flu does not completely prevent, the disease can become milder and prevent serious complications such as hospital stays and death,” said Hopkins.
Hopkins said that he did not “completely” agree with the social media post and demand the removal of the flu vaccine from the market. “This action would lead to more Illness And death by flu, ”he said.
Nabin Shrestha, a doctor and co -author of the study, said, although the results found an increased risk of influenza for vaccinated participants, the authors understood that the increased risk could have been “from an unknowledged factor” and therefore did not come to the conclusion that the vaccine increases the risk of infection.
Shrestha also said that the study does not indicate that the influenza vaccine should be pulled out of the market, since people are more likely to receive the flu more often. “Overall, the flu vaccine is an important instrument of public health,” he said.
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Who took part in the study?
The Cleveland Clinic requires employees to maintain the annual flu vaccine or to seek medical or religious -based exemption, so this study comprised a high number of vaccinated people.
43,857 were vaccinated by the participants during the investigation period, with 98.7 percent receiving the inactivated triple influenza vaccine. At the end of the study, 1,079 participants received the flu – about 2 percent of the total study population.
Pacetti said it was remarkable that only 2 percent of the participants were connected to influenza during the investigation period. “The population did not include children and contained very few older or immunocompromised people,” she said.
The results of the study showed that the cumulative incidence of influenza – or the number of new cases divided by the total number of persons in the study (vaccinated and not vaccinated) rose faster than the non -vaccinated participants.
The authors found that the influenza vaccine had a negative effectiveness, which indicates that the vaccine could not prevent effective influenza for this season.
What do these results mean?
The effectiveness of the flu vaccine can vary per season and per person (taking characteristics such as age and health), the CDC said. Their effectiveness also depends on its similarity to the influenza viruses circulating in the municipality, the agency said.
Data from the agency showed that the effectiveness of the seasonal flu vaccine or, as well as the vaccine, serious illnesses and hospital stays, prevents changes per season with an effectiveness rate of 42 percent during the 2023-2024 season. The researchers found that it reduced the risk of flu -related outpatient visits and hospital stays in children, young people and adults.
Hopkins said the study did not discuss whether the workplace had masking guidelines or other restrictions on non -vaccinated employees, which could “have an important influence on the incidence of influenza”, especially for those who work in clinical environments. Around 10,900 participants had a clinical care job, according to the study.
Pacetti and Jeffrey Morris, biostatistics director at the Medical School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, also said that the vaccines mainly reduce the risk of death or serious illnesses that the study does not take into account.
The article states that the effectiveness of the vaccine in a certain year “depends on how similar the tribes of the tribes contained in the vaccine are that cause infection this year”.
The study authors also said because almost all participants used triple inactivated influenza vaccine, it is possible that other influenza vaccines were more effective.
