If you've been paying attention to the flu season this year, you might've caught wind of a bombshell study out of the Cleveland Clinic that's turning heads, and raising some serious questions about the flu shots we've been told to line up for every fall. Posted as a preprint on medRxiv on April 4, 2025,
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.01.30.25321421v3
this research tracked over 53,000 employees in Ohio over six months to see how well the 2024-2025 flu vaccine held up. The results? Not only did the vaccine fail to protect against the flu, but adults who got the jab were 27% more likely to catch it than those who skipped it. You read that right—more likely! Alex Berenson, a sharp-eyed journalist, picked up the story on his Substack, framing it as the latest nail in the coffin of flu shot hype and a wake-up call for public health officials who keep pushing these vaccines despite a deadly 2025 flu season that's claiming up to 130,000 lives, according to CDC estimates. So, what's going on here, and why should we take this seriously?
Let's start with the study itself. The Cleveland Clinic's team looked at a hefty group—53,402 workers, to be exact—split between 43,857 who got vaccinated and 9,545 who didn't, thanks to medical or religious exemptions. These weren't random folks off the street; they were hospital employees, from nurses to desk staff, averaging 42 years old and mostly female, a relatively young and healthy bunch you'd expect the vaccine to work best for. Over 25 weeks starting October 1, 2024, researchers tracked lab-confirmed flu cases. By late March 2025, over 2% of the vaccinated group had the flu, compared to about 1.5% of the unvaccinated. That gap widened as the season peaked, and after crunching the numbers with a fancy statistical tool called Cox proportional hazards regression, which I know nothing about—adjusting for age, sex, job type, location, and even how eager people were to get vaccinated—the vaccine's effectiveness landed at a jaw-dropping -26.9%. That's not just "it didn't work"; it's "it made things worse," with a P-value of 0.02, meaning this isn't some fluke.
Berenson jumps on this, and for good reason. He's been sceptical of flu shots for years, pointing out that since 1980, the number of doses in the U.S. has ballooned 15-fold while flu deaths keep climbing. This year's toll—potentially the worst in decades—only fuels his fire. He argues the Cleveland Clinic data isn't just a one-off; it's a crack in the facade of a public health system that's been peddling flu vaccines without solid proof they deliver. The study's authors are more reserved, admitting it's a single-centre snapshot and that their healthy worker cohort might not mirror everyone. But they still suggest this could apply nationwide, and Berenson runs with it, calling for an end to the flu shot charade until we get big, placebo-controlled trials to settle the score.
Now, you can bet the vaccine cheerleaders will push back. They'll say it's just a preprint, not peer-reviewed yet, so we shouldn't jump the gun. Fair enough—peer review matters. But medRxiv isn't some shady corner of the internet; it's a legit platform, and the Cleveland Clinic isn't exactly a fly-by-night outfit. The study lays out its methods and data for all to see, which is more than you can say for some polished journal articles that hide behind paywalls for months. Critics might also argue the results are quirky because of who these workers are—maybe the unvaccinated dodged the flu by sheer luck or some unmeasured health edge? Except the researchers adjusted for that, factoring in everything from whether you're a nurse breathing flu germs all day to how health-conscious you are. Testing rates were similar too, so it's not like the vaccinated were just getting checked more often.
What's really interesting is that negative effectiveness—vaccines making you more prone to the flu— isn't as crazy as it sounds. It could be a mismatch between the vaccine strains and what's circulating, or maybe some weird immune interference from past shots or even those mRNA Covid jabs Berenson speculates about. The study doesn't nail down why, but it doesn't have to; it's evidence enough to demand answers. And it's not alone—past flu seasons, like 2008-2009, have shown vaccines flopping hard when the guesswork on strains goes wrong. Berenson ties this to a bigger problem: the "healthy vaccine bias" that's skewed older studies. People who get vaccinated tend to be healthier or more cautious, so when they do better, we credit the shot instead of their habits. This study flips that script, showing worse outcomes even after accounting for those traits.
So why does this matter? Because while public health bigwigs keep telling us to roll up our sleeves, the flu's killing more people than ever, and the Cleveland Clinic data suggests our main defence might be backfiring. Berenson's not wrong to call for a reckoning—without gold-standard trials comparing vaccinated and unvaccinated folks over years, we're just guessing with people's health. Sure, some will say flu shots at least cut severity, not just infections, but that's cold comfort if they're boosting your odds of getting sick in the first place. And with 2025's body count climbing, we can't afford to shrug this off as a fluke.
The bottom line? This study's no silver bullet, but it's a loud shot across the bow. It's got the numbers, the rigour, and a story that fits a growing unease about flu vaccines. Berenson's urgency might ruffle feathers, but he's right to demand scrutiny. The preprint status doesn't kill its credibility—it just means we're in on the ground floor of a debate that's overdue. Public health can't keep coasting on faith when the flu's winning. Maybe it's time to rethink the jab, not just double down.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.01.30.25321421v3
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/urgent-people-who-received-a-flu
"A big new study has offered yet more evidence that flu shots do not work - and may sometimes even increase the chances people will get influenza.
With flu deaths in the United States soaring in 2025 despite aggressive vaccination efforts, when will public health bureaucrats admit the truth of their failure?
Adults who received a flu shot were 27 percent more likely to get the flu this winter, Cleveland Clinic researchers found. You read that right. Their risk was higher.
"We were unable to find that the influenza vaccine has been effective in preventing infection," the researchers wrote, in a masterpiece of understatement.
The study covered 53,400 adults in Ohio for six months, a big enough group that the results reached statistical significance, meaning they almost surely were not due to chance.
The researchers posted the results as a "preprint" on Friday, meaning their findings has not yet been subject to peer review. But the study design and outcome look solid.
They looked at influenza infections among Ohio-based employees at the Cleveland Clinic, which includes more than 55,000 workers at the flagship hospital, several smaller medical centers, and walk-in clinics.
The Clinic requires its employees to get flu shots, but about 20 percent claimed medical and religious exemptions and refused during the 2024-2025 flu season. So researchers could compare almost 44,000 people who received shots in the fall of 2024 with almost 10,000 who did not.
They found that by late March 2025, over 2 percent of people who had received the jab had a documented flu infection. Only about 1.5 percent of people who had not gotten the jab had an infection. The gap grew sharply during the last few weeks of the study.
The negative effectiveness remained even after the researchers adjusted for age, sex, where the employees worked, and whether they were nurses, who might be more exposed to the flu than other employees.
The researchers also found that unvaccinated and vaccinated people had positive test results at roughly the same rates, suggesting that higher flu rates in the vaccinated probably didn't come from the fact that they were somewhat more likely to be tested.
About 72 percent of the employees were women, and their average age was 42, so they were a relatively young and healthy group — the people for whom the flu shot is theoretically most likely to be effective.
In their discussion, the researchers suggested they had no reason to believe their finding was not generalizable to adults everywhere in the United States.
This research is only the latest to suggest that flu shots simply do not work — and that any observational studies that seem to show their effectiveness are fatally flawed by what researchers called healthy vaccinee bias. (People who are vaccinated are historically healthier, more health-conscious, and more fearful of contagious illness and thus more likely to avoid situations where they might become infected than those who are not.)
Nationwide data is equally troubling.
As I reported in 2022, the number of flu shots has risen almost 15-fold in the United States since 1980, yet flu deaths have only increased. The Centers for Disease Control now says this year's flu season might have been the deadliest in decades, with up to 130,000 deaths.
The media has been loathe to report that ugly number, since doing so might raise questions about both the effectiveness of flu jabs and whether Covid mRNA shots may have somehow damaged the immune systems of people who received them. At best, though, that figure suggests nothing we're doing about the flu is working.
Yet public health authorities continue to push flu shots heavily.
In the absence of large, long-term placebo-controlled trials that compare infections, hospitalizations, deaths, and side effects in people who did not receive influenza "vaccines" to those who did, they are doing nothing but playing games with the health of the people they're supposed to be serving.
They need to stop.
Now."