A new Cleveland Clinic study conducted in the United States on the flu vaccine has grabbed vaccine scepticsโ interest, prompting questions and concerns about the vaccineโs safety.
โGet the flu shot and you are 27% more likely to get the flu!โ read an April 7 X post that referenced a preprint study published on April 4. โGET THE SHOT GET THE DISEASE!โ
๐จ๐จBREAKING: GET THE FLU SHOT AND YOU ARE 27% MORE LIKELY TO GET THE FLU!!!!
Just like the COVID jabs and pretty much any other โvaccineโ it appears that the flu shot is an abject failure. In a preprint study from the Cleveland Clinic, employees that got the flu shot had a 27%โฆ pic.twitter.com/w70bVF3wa3
โ Tom Renz (@RenzTom) April 7, 2025
The next day, another X post trumpeted news of the study with a call for action: โAll flu โvaccinesโ must be pulled from the market pending large prospective studies of their safety and effectiveness.โ
The warnings cite a non-peer-reviewed article by Cleveland Clinic researchers titled Effectiveness of the Influenza Vaccine During the 2024-2025 Respiratory Viral Season. It was posted on April 4 on the preprint server medRxiv, which discloses in bold typeface at the top that it โreports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practiceโ.
What the study says โ and what it does not
The study involved 53,402 Cleveland Clinic Health System employees in Ohio and found that its vaccinated participants had a higher incidence of infection in the most recent flu season. But a Cleveland Clinic spokesperson said itโs misleading to use the study to draw broader conclusions about vaccines and susceptibility to infection.
โThe data came from a relatively healthy population of about 50,000 healthcare workers and did not represent the general population,โ Cleveland Clinic spokesperson Andrea Pacetti said.
The flu vaccine helps prevent flu cases from getting more severe and requiring hospitalisation. Every year, the US Food and Drug Administrationโs (FDAโs) Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee decides which viruses to use for the upcoming seasonโs flu vaccine. Data collected by the FDA, World Health Organization, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other partners on which flu strains are circulating around the world inform that committeeโs decision. (The committeeโs meeting to discuss influenza vaccine strains for the 2025-2026 influenza season was cancelled.)
According to the CDC, during seasons when the flu vaccine strains and the circulating flu strains match, the vaccine โhas been shown to reduce the risk of having to go to the doctor with flu by 40% to 60%โ.
Robert H Hopkins Jr, the medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, said the Cleveland Clinic study does not evaluate the primary benefit for getting vaccinated against influenza: reducing oneโs risk for severe illness, hospitalisation and death.
โPeople should be aware that the effectiveness of flu vaccines vary from year to year, but even when flu vaccination does not prevent infection completely, it can make the illness milder and prevent serious complications, including hospitalisation and death,โ Hopkins said.
Hopkins said he โcompletelyโ disagrees with the social media post calling for flu vaccinesโ removal from the market. โThat action would result in more disease and death from flu,โ he said.
Nabin Shrestha, a physician and coauthor of the study, said although the results found an increased risk of influenza among vaccinated participants, the authors understood that the increased risk โcould have been from an unrecognised factorโ and, therefore, did not conclude that the vaccine increases infection risk.
Shrestha also said the study did not suggest that the influenza vaccine should be pulled from the market because it makes people more likely to get the flu. โOverall, the flu vaccine is an important public health tool,โ he said.
[BELOW: We have an incomplete photo credit โ no full photogโs name]
Who participated in the study?ย
Cleveland Clinic requires workers to get the annual flu vaccine or seek a medical- or religion-based exemption, so this study involved a high number of vaccinated people.
Of the participants, 43,857 were vaccinated during the study period with 98.7 percent receiving the inactivated trivalent influenza vaccine. By the studyโs end, 1,079 participants had gotten the flu โ roughly 2 percent of the entire study population.
Pacetti said it was notable that only 2 percent of the participants contracted influenza during the study period. โThe population did not include children and contained very few elderly or immunocompromised individuals,โ she said.
The studyโs results indicated the cumulative incidence of influenza โ or the number of new cases divided by the total number of people in the study at risk (vaccinated and not vaccinated) โ increased faster among the vaccinated participants than the unvaccinated ones.
The authors found that the influenza vaccine had a negative effectiveness, โsuggesting that the vaccine has not been effective in preventing influenzaโ for that season.
What do these findings mean?
Flu vaccine effectiveness can vary per season and per person (factoring in characteristics such as age and health),ย the CDC said. Their effectiveness also depends on their similarity to the influenza viruses circulating in the community, the agency said.
Data from the agency showed seasonal flu vaccine effectiveness โ or how well the vaccine prevents severe illness and hospitalisation โ changes per season with a 42 percent effectiveness rate during the 2023-2024 season. Researchers found it reduced the risk for flu-related outpatient visits and hospitalisations among children, adolescents and adults.
Hopkins said the study did not discuss if the workplace had masking policies or other restrictions for unvaccinated employees, which โcould have an important impact on the incidence of influenzaโ, especially for those working in clinical settings. About 10,900 participants had a clinical nursing job, the study said.
Pacetti and Jeffrey Morris, biostatistics director at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, also said the vaccines primarily reduce the risk of death or severe disease, which the study does not address.
The article said the vaccineโs effectiveness in any given year โdepends on how similar the strains contained in the vaccine are to the strains causing infection that yearโ.
The studyโs authors also said because nearly all of its participants used the trivalent inactivated influenza vaccine, itโs possible that other influenza vaccines may have been more effective.
