A newly published, U.S. government-funded, peer-reviewed study has confirmed that a live attenuated influenza vaccine caused detectable post-vaccination viral shedding in more than 91% of adult recipients, raising major questions about whether vaccinated individuals function as carriers and spreaders of vaccine-derived influenza pathogens after immunization.
The findings, published Thursday in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, claim that the purported virus inside the vaccine actively replicated inside recipients after administration and was subsequently shed from the nose in the overwhelming majority of participants.
Researchers from George Washington University evaluated 283 healthy adults between the ages of 18 and 49 who received the intranasal live attenuated influenza vaccine (LAIV), FluMist, during the 2023–2024 and 2024–2025 flu seasons.
Study Only Looked for 7 Days
Importantly, the researchers stopped monitoring participants after approximately seven days.
That means the study cannot determine:
- how many participants continued shedding beyond day 7,
- how long shedding ultimately persisted,
- or when the slow-clearance group fully stopped shedding vaccine-derived influenza material.
https://open.substack.com/pub/jonfleetwood/p/91-of-flu-vaccine-recipients-shed