Flu is out of control in the United States

Could a long-term immunosuppressive effect of repeated mRNA Covid shots be part of the reason? Don't expect the media to ask.

Heard about the 2025 influenza epidemic?

Emergency room visits for flu-like symptoms are the highest in a generation. Over 50,000 Americans were hospitalized in the week ended Feb. 8, the newest available data. For the first time since Covid began, flu is killing more people than Sars-Cov-2.

Yet even as the media hypes the risk of a nonexistent bird-flu epidemic in humans, it is largely ignoring the actual flu crisis.

One likely reason: even the dumbest reporters would rather not remind people of their 2020 panic. They know they’ll be tarred and feathered if they call for school closures or lockdowns. All we can do is ride out the season, so best to say as little as possible.

But maybe there’s another reason?

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(I’m still on the mRNA wall, still watching for damage. Help me stay there.)

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In a short article last week reporting that “Flu Cases Are Surging,” Times write Dani Blum expressed bafflement over the reasons for this season’s epidemic. “It’s not entirely clear why the current flu season has been so severe,” she wrote, before speculating that lower vaccine coverage might be the reason.

Beyond the fact the flu shot is provably useless, this theory has a minor flaw. The Centers for Disease Control reports exactly the same percentage of American adults received flu shots this winter as in the 2023-2024 season. And I mean exactly:

“As of February 1, 2025, 45.0%… of adults received a flu vaccination, similar to last season at this same time point (45.0%).”

So a lack of flu vaccines isn’t the problem. What else could be?

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(Don’t take it from me, take it from the nice lefty public health experts at Your Local Epidemiologist.)

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Most people do not know that the “m” in mRNA Covid jabs doesn’t really stand for “messenger.” It stands for “modified,” because the RNA in the jabs is not identical to the RNA in nature.

mRNA is a thread of four types of “nucleotides,” simple carbon-based molecules linked in a long chain. But the mRNA in Covid shots contains a slightly different kind of nucleotide, one that tamps down our immune systems and makes them less likely to recognize the vaccine as a foreign body and attack it.

Again, I’ll let a source even the “Believe in Science” crew will accept (Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai) explain:

Modified mRNA (modRNA) therapeutics are an innovative pharmaceutical technology with the capacity to create new types of drugs… two fundamental barriers prevent[ed] mRNA therapeutics from moving forward into clinical use. One barrier is that mRNA elicits an innate immune response...

[But] two researchers, Katalin Karikó, PhD and Drew Weissman, MD demonstrated that replacing uridine (U) [one of the four nucleotides in natural mRNA] with naturally occurring pseudouridine (Ψ) attenuates the innate immune response and improves modRNA stability. Recently, modRNA has been successfully used to… vaccinate millions of people around the world during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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(Please join me.)

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Lucky for Pfizer, Moderna and the vaccine fanatics, both “modified” and natural “messenger” start with “m.” So mRNA can stand for either. (Intentionally) confusing, amirite?

For their hard work attenuating the innate immune reponse, Karikó and Weissman won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2023.

But even after the clinical trials of mRNA Covid shots in 2020, which covered more than 70,000 people, we had no way of knowing if the downregulation that the shots produce might somehow in the long run lead our immune systems to be less aggressive against other foreign invaders, such as flu. How could we? We effectively ended the trials in early 2021 by giving mRNA shots to almost everyone who had received the placebo in the trials.

Nor could we know if giving people a third, fourth, fifth, or even more “booster” mRNA Covid shots might cause immune dysregulation in ways that the first two shots did not. How could we? The companies ran much smaller and shorter trials on the third shot and have barely run any on subsequent boosters.

What we do know now is that mRNA shots cause an unexpected shift towards a less effective form of antibodies against Covid in people who have received at least three.

That shift does not mean that a hangover from the unique way the mRNAs suppress our immune system is giving the flu, or other viruses, a novel advantage as they attack our bodies. It’s entirely possible this is just a bad flu season.

But we deserve to know for sure.