I’m going to have to be very careful what I say in this video for reasons that will become very clear in a moment.
I’m going to read word for word from this medical study and I’m not going to editorialize. I will give a few explanatory or clarifying notes and information to supplement what’s contained in the study, but I won’t add my own opinions. I will attempt to avoid any and all statements of my opinion and stick strictly to the information provided by these study authors as well as a neutral explanation of some of the details and definitions to help you to make sense of what’s happening in this study. The study is titled Effectiveness of the Influenza Vaccine During the 2024-2025 Respiratory Viral Season: A Prospective Cohort Study. Now, this is a pre-print, but it’s already been through some revisions since April this year when I first came across it, and I expect that it reached its final form in October of this year, just awaiting formal publication. But, of course, we can’t yet be certain of that.
Now, a prospective cohort study is a kind of study where they get a bunch of people before they know who will or won’t get a given illness.
Now, that’s distinct from studies that take people who already have a given illness to study what happens to them. This is just a huge group of people, 53,42 to be exact, who were selected in advance and followed just to see what would happen to them and what the effect of the influenza vaccine would be on their health and on their likelihood of getting influenza. So, what happened to them? Well, we’ll get to the results in a moment, but first, my name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher Project, and I help busy people like you to cut through the crap, make sense of the nonsense, and keep up with the world as it changes around us. I’m 100% viewer supported. I have no advertisers or benefactors. So, if you appreciate what I’m doing here and how I bring you stories that you don’t see elsewhere, then please help me to keep the Topher project going by buying me a coffee via the button that you’ll find at topherfield.net.
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All right, here we go. And again, I need to avoid any editorializing or any of my own opinions. I’m just going to read and in places explain what this study has found. Let’s start with the summary. Line 19 summary: Among 53,42 working-aged Cleveland Clinic employees, we were unable to find a protective influence of influenza vaccination during the 2024-25 respiratory viral season and found a significantly higher risk of influenza with vaccination when influenza activity was high. Now, note the distinction they’re making in that summary. Across the board, they were unable to find a protective influence. And then specifically, when influenza activity was high, at the very time when you would most want the vaccine to be effective, they actually found that people who had received the vaccine were at higher risk of getting influenza.
Now, I’m going to read through the abstract in full before we then get to some of the details from later in the study. Again, I’m just going to read it. Background: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the influenza vaccine during the 2024-2025 respiratory viral season. Methods: Employees of Cleveland Clinic in employment in Ohio on October 1st, 2024 were included. The cumulative incidence of influenza among those in the vaccinated and unvaccinated states was compared over the following 33 weeks. Protection provided by vaccination, analyzed as a time-dependent co-variant, was evaluated using multivariable Cox proportional hazard regression. Now that is a well-accepted statistical method. You don’t need to know how it works. Honestly, I struggle a bit with it too. But just understand that is the standard practice in studies like this one to be able to analyze the data. Back to the study, including adjusting for influenza activity as an effect modifier. Now, that last line is significant to me because in the earlier preprint versions from April 2025, they didn’t do that yet. They didn’t adjust for influenza activity as an effect modifier. So, I presume that the inclusion of this detail is the result of either the peer-review process or perhaps the result of the authors themselves just thinking and looking a bit more deeply into their data. So, they realized that there was such a distinct difference in the effectiveness when the influenza activity was high versus when it was not.
Now back to the study results: Among 53,42 employees, 43,920 or 82.2% were vaccinated by the end of the study.
Influenza occurred in 1,130 or 2.12% during the study. The cumulative incidence of influenza was similar for the vaccinated and unvaccinated states early, but over time the cumulative incidence of influenza increased more rapidly among the vaccinated than among the unvaccinated. In a multivariable Cox proportional hazards regression analysis, the risk of influenza was not significantly different during periods when influenza activity was low or medium. They do provide the numbers in the study with 95% confidence intervals for anyone that’s interested in the details, but was significantly higher for the vaccinated state than the unvaccinated state when influenza activity was high. And again, they provide you with the numbers.
Conclusions: This study was unable to find a protective influence of influenza vaccine among working-aged adults among the 2024-25 respiratory viral season and found that influenza vaccination was associated with a higher risk of influenza when influenza activity was high. End quote.
There’s a few things that we do need to keep in mind here. The first is that these results apply to the specific vaccine and year that they come from, the 2024-25 northern hemisphere flu season. And whilst they are certainly important results and I believe that a lot more people need to know about these results, there are also valid cautions against assuming that this is what happens every single year because there are differences and the study addresses that from line 55 onwards. Additionally, the effectiveness of the vaccine in any given year depends on how similar the strains contained in the vaccine are to the strains causing infection that year.
The most widely used seasonal influenza vaccine is the trivalent inactivated vaccine, which is composed of two influenza A virus types and an influenza B type.
A new vaccine is produced each year in an attempt to match the vaccine strains to the strains projected to be the most prominent in the upcoming influenza season. Since the current process of developing vaccine typically takes a few months, a decision on which strains to include in the vaccine must be made several months in advance. In years where there is a good match between the vaccine strains and the infecting strain, vaccine effectiveness is expected, note expected, to be good. In years where there is a poor match between vaccine strains and the circulating infecting strain, vaccine effectiveness is expected to be poor. Again, I’m just reading their words here. Notice that this isn’t one of the new mRNA type gene therapies that we’ve seen since Covid. This is an inactivated type vaccine. One of the ones that’s been around for a long, long time. One of the ones about which we’re told the science is settled.
But then even the authors of this study go on to throw considerable shade at the state of the science from line 74 onwards. But we need to read from line 69 onwards for context. Healthcare resource utilization, including hospitalizations and resource needs such as quantity of antiviral medications needed, are strongly affected by how effective the vaccine is during any respiratory viral season. Early estimates of vaccine effectiveness of the influenza vaccine during any respiratory viral season can provide information that can help healthcare institutions and pharmacies prepare for the remainder of the season. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have a network to estimate vaccine effectiveness in the United States each year and has published interim vaccine effectiveness estimates for the 2024-25 season.
The study reported that the VE, or vaccine effectiveness, to be surprisingly good when considering that practicing physicians in our part of the country
observed that a substantial proportion of vaccinated persons acquired influenza during this season, and it was not uncommon for entire vaccinated families to have the infection, thereby raising serious questions about the accuracy of the VE estimates obtained. That is throwing serious shade in medical language. In plain English, what they’re saying is that the CDC uses early results to project overall results and effectiveness for the year, and the authors of this study are questioning the accuracy of the CDC estimates because the CDC said that this year the influenza vaccine is going to be very effective and the authors of this study observed that it was not. And in fact, this study actually shows negative effectiveness during periods of high viral activity. This is not the first time that official projections have turned out to be wildly inaccurate. Just saying.
Now, I bring you this story because I think it’s important to know about this both for yourself and for your loved ones. The science is most definitely not settled. The predictions provided by official government channels now have a very clear history of being wrong. And you need to make your own medical choices based on what’s best for you, not what’s best for a government bureaucrat. Now, I’ll put a link to this study in the description in case you’d like to read it for yourself.
My name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher Project, and I help busy people like you to keep up with the world as it changes around us. I am 100% viewer supported. So, if you appreciate me bringing you this story about this study, something that I doubt you will have heard in many other places, then please buy me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. And don’t forget to grab a t-shirt or a hoodie in your favorite designs before they are discontinued at the end of November. And grab a copy of my books or my DVD while you’re there. You’ll find all of that at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com.
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