Effectiveness of the Influenza Vaccine During the 2024-2025 Respiratory Viral Season

  

View ORCID ProfileNabin K. Shrestha, Patrick C. Burke, Amy S. Nowacki, Steven M. Gordon

doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.01.30.25321421

ABSTRACT

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 1, 2024, were included. The cumulative incidence of influenza among those in the vaccinated and unvaccinated states was compared over the following 25 weeks. Protection provided by vaccination (analyzed as a time-dependent covariate) was evaluated using Cox proportional hazards regression.

Results Among 53402 employees, 43857 (82.1%) had received the influenza vaccine by the end of the study. Influenza occurred in 1079 (2.02%) during the study. The cumulative incidence of influenza was similar for the vaccinated and unvaccinated states early, but over the course of the study the cumulative incidence of influenza increased more rapidly among the vaccinated than the unvaccinated. In an analysis adjusted for age, sex, clinical nursing job, and employment location, the risk of influenza was significantly higher for the vaccinated compared to the unvaccinated state (HR, 1.27; 95% C.I., 1.07 – 1.51; P = 0.007), yielding a calculated vaccine effectiveness of −26.9% (95% C.I., −55.0 to −6.6%).

Conclusions This study found that influenza vaccination of working-aged adults was associated with a higher risk of influenza during the 2024-2025 respiratory viral season, suggesting that the vaccine has not been effective in preventing influenza this season.

Summary Among 53402 working-aged Cleveland Clinic employees, we were unable to find that the influenza vaccine has been effective in preventing infection during the 2024-2025 respiratory viral season.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Funding Statement

This study did not receive any funding

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.01.30.25321421v3

China denounces as 'blackmail' Trump's threat to ratchet tariffs higher

 China decried as "blackmail" on Tuesday U.S. President Donald Trump's threat to add a further tariff of 50% on its goods, after he demanded that Beijing withdraw its plans for counter-tariffs.

If neither side blinks and Trump sticks to his plans, total new levies could climb to 104% this year on Chinese goods imported into the United States, escalating a trade war that has already spurred the biggest market losses since the pandemic.

"The U.S. side's threat to escalate tariffs against China is a mistake on top of a mistake, once again exposing the American side's blackmailing nature," China's commerce ministry said in a statement.

"If the U.S. insists on having its way, China will fight to the end."

Trump said he would impose the additional 50% duty on U.S. imports from China on Wednesday if Beijing did not withdraw the 34% tariffs it had imposed on U.S. products last week.

Those Chinese tariffs, in turn, had come in response to 34% "reciprocal" duties announced by Trump.

The average U.S. tariff on Chinese goods is already set to climb to 76% following Trump's levies last week, which hit China with a tariff of 34%, in addition to 20% he previously imposed this year.

The moves have led economists to question whether the White House stands to gain much from hiking rates further.

"Since China already faces a tariff rate in excess of 60%, it doesn't matter if it goes up by 50% or 500%," said Xu Tianchen, senior economist at the Economist Intelligence Unit.

"What China can do is stop U.S. farming purchases, match U.S. tariffs and expand its export controls across the periodic table of chemical elements," he added.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/china-says-never-accept-us-011150420.html

Harvard plans to borrow $750 million after federal funding threats

 Harvard University plans to borrow $750 million from Wall Street as part of contingency preparations, it said on Monday, days after President Donald Trump's administration announced a review of $9 billion in federal grants and contracts to the Ivy League school in a crackdown on alleged antisemitism on campuses.

In a letter to Harvard last week, the government listed conditions that Harvard must meet to receive federal money, including a ban on protesters wearing masks to hide their identities and other restrictions.

Harvard acknowledged receiving the letter but did not comment further.

"As part of ongoing contingency planning for a range of financial circumstances, Harvard is evaluating resources needed to advance its academic and research priorities," Harvard University said in Monday's statement.

Harvard's plans come less than a week after Princeton University said in a notice dated April 1 that it was also considering the sale of about $320 million of taxable bonds later this month. Princeton said last week the U.S. government froze several dozen research grants to the school.

Harvard intends to issue up to $750 million of taxable bonds for "general corporate purposes," a spokesperson said. The university had $7.1 billion of debt outstanding at the end of fiscal year 2024, and anticipated about $8.2 billion after the proposed bond issuance.

The university most recently issued $434 million in tax-exempt bonds in March 2025 and $735 million in tax-exempt bonds in spring 2024, its spokesperson said, adding it also issued bonds in 2022.

Harvard has a $53 billion endowment, the largest of any U.S. university. Advocates, students and several faculty members have called on university leadership to resist the demands from the Trump administration.

Trump has threatened to slash federal funding for U.S. universities that his administration says have tolerated antisemitism on their campuses.

Such allegations have grown out of a wave of pro-Palestinian protests at Harvard and other schools against Israel's military assault on Gaza that has killed over 50,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza's health ministry, and led to genocide and war crimes allegations that Israel denies.

The Israeli onslaught followed an October 2023 attack inside Israel by Islamist group Hamas, which took over 250 hostages. The attack killed 1,200 people, according to Israeli tallies.

Protesters, including some Jewish groups, say the Trump administration wrongly conflates their criticism of Israel's actions in Gaza and advocacy for Palestinian rights with antisemitism and support for Hamas.

But some Jewish students on some campuses have said they have felt threatened by protesters, and that some academic courses are biased against Israel.

Rights advocates have also raised concerns about Islamophobia and anti-Arab bias during the Israel-Gaza war. The Trump administration has not announced steps in response.

Last month, the government warned 60 universities that it could bring enforcement actions if a review determined the schools had failed to stop antisemitism.

Harvard's student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, recently reported that two leaders of Harvard University's Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Director Cemal Kafadar and Associate Director Rosie Bsheer, were dismissed from their positions.

TRUMP CRACKDOWN

The Trump administration also planned to freeze grants to Brown University.

Last month, it canceled $400 million in federal funding for Columbia University, the epicenter of last year's campus protests.

Columbia agreed to some significant changes that Trump's administration demanded as a precondition for talks about restoring the funding.

Federal agents have detained some foreign student protesters in recent weeks from different campuses and are working to deport them. The government has revoked the visas of many foreign students.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/harvard-plans-to-borrow-750-million-after-federal-funding-threats/ar-AA1Cu96P

Trump’s Tariffs Tackle Clinton’s China Carnage

 

By J.B. Shurk

Twenty-five years ago, President Clinton used his remaining time in office to advocate on China’s behalf.  He argued that the communist regime should be admitted to the World Trade Organization and that the United States should grant the totalitarian state permanent normal trade relations.  Critics of China pointed to the Tiananmen Square Massacre the decade before as ample reason to deny it any economic reward.  Critics of Clinton pointed to allegations that his political campaign had accepted illicit contributions from China as ample reason to doubt the president’s motives.  Still, Clinton got what he wanted, and China became a member of the WTO the very next year.

In truth, Clinton was only a loud voice representing a conglomerate of international business interests that had long desired to grow profits by tapping into China’s abundant supply of slave labor.  They don’t teach that nugget of truth to the kiddies suffering through public school indoctrination.  The Marxists who control the teachers’ unions and write the textbooks advance the common narrative that Clinton’s efforts to welcome China into the planet’s most lucrative trade clubs were part of a larger, well intentioned foreign policy plan to westernize China and make the communist country more like us.  Would you believe that thousands of American businesses moved their operations to China over the last two-plus decades because they were eager to liberalize the communist nation, institute massive workplace regulations, utilize more expensive “green” energies, and constantly hike China’s minimum wage?  Me neither.

Slave labor was always the point.  Building things in a totalitarian nation that brutalizes striking workers and imprisons agitators in labor camps was always the point.  Moving operations to a country that doesn’t give a fig about protecting the environment or workers’ health was always the point.  The foreign policy crowd can pretend that enriching the Chinese Communist Party with global trade was some brilliant gambit to turn China into Norway, but the economic titans who pushed that public propaganda were actually looking for cheap workers with no rights.  They weren’t interested in liberating a billion Chinese; they were interested in liberating themselves from expensive environmental and labor regulations in the United States.  They offshored their workforces to take advantage of slavery by proxy.

Until Clinton helped to secure China’s membership in the WTO, the communist nation was on the ropes.  It could barely feed its people.  It had a third-world economy.  Despite the United Kingdom’s handover of Hong Kong in ’97, the Chinese Communist Party remained an international pariah after its slaughter of students protesting for democracy.  There was no reason to reward China’s human rights abuses by elevating it on the international stage.  There was no reason to suspect that a dangerous new “Cold War” would develop between a wealthy United States and an impoverished China unless the former offered the latter normalized trade relations.  Had Clinton and his Western allies maintained economic pressure on China, it is likely that there would be no Chinese Communist Party today.  It would be buried in an unmarked grave alongside Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union — which would have been fitting, since each totalitarian system murdered and disposed of millions the same way.

Instead, the Chinese Communist Party has grown only more powerful over the last twenty-five years.  China has become the planet’s premier manufacturing hub.  Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum globalists are so envious of China’s technocratic surveillance that they regularly promote programs meant to remake the West in China’s image.  Warren Buffett’s right-hand man, the now-deceased Charlie Munger, was a huge fan of the way Chinese communists controlled their economy.  

The U.S. trade deficit with China was around five billion dollars in the mid-’80s.  It has spiked to nearly four hundred billion dollars today!  Excluding services and energy, mining, and agricultural products, the U.S. is running a manufacturing deficit of roughly half a trillion dollars with China every year.  Since Clinton and the foreign policy gurus opened America’s doors to Chinese goods, the United States has outsourced most of its manufacturing to its chief geopolitical adversary.

Now, that’s a brilliant foreign policy!  Three decades ago, China’s economy was fragile, and its future was uncertain.  And though many economists would argue that China’s economy is still fragile today (centrally controlled communist systems always are), the Chinese Communist Party has never been more powerful.  It has the largest military in the world, is expanding its naval and hybrid warfare capabilities at an exponential pace, and is becoming a real threat to American military supremacy. 

The China trade enthusiasts told us that offshoring American manufacturing jobs to the other side of the world would prevent a future devastating conflict with China and transform the communist regime into friendly business partners who would grow to appreciate the benefits of freedom and democracy.  Instead, U.S. politicians and business leaders destroyed America’s industrial and manufacturing self-sufficiency while transferring trillions of dollars of wealth to China’s military.  

Well done, “expert” class!  What will you think of next — maybe fund reckless bioweapon experiments in a leaky Chinese laboratory?  D’oh! — the “best and brightest” already have.  

I get so angry when I see abandoned factories and dilapidated business districts across the United States.  These places are not just reminders of lost jobs; they’re the rusty, dusty remains of lost lives.  They weren’t just opportunities for a paycheck; they were opportunities for families to build happy homes and take care of their children.  They gave people purpose.  They united local communities.  They were the backbone of the middle class.

Then came NAFTA, and millions of blue-collar jobs disappeared to Mexico and Central America.  When Clinton and his friends partnered with the Chinese Communist Party, America’s working class was hollowed out.  Oh, sure, Clinton promised betrayed workers that they would all soon have high-paying jobs in a new service sector that would magically appear.  It turned out that Wall Street bankers got those jobs.  Main Street workers were even passed over for over-the-phone customer service positions; the same people who sent America’s best dirty jobs to China figured out they could save a bundle by redirecting business calls to sweatshops in India.  Long before corporate news reporters hectored fired mineworkers to “learn to code,” America’s most obnoxious “free traders” were telling fired factory workers that they’d all have high-paying “service jobs” in the “new economy.”  They got welfare checks, deadly drugs, and decades of empty promises instead.

The end result of all this offshoring was the growth of an American wasteland.  Politicians do their best to hide the evidence.  They turn crumbling workshops and warehouses into high-end apartments.  They build highways over forgotten neighborhoods.  Entire towns in parts of the South and Midwest are all but erased from online maps.  Like sepulchers in a cemetery overrun with weeds, the temples once housing America’s vibrant industry lie in ruins.  Boarded-up buildings are skeletal monuments to the workingman’s better days.

Why?  So that national companies could become international behemoths?  So that global firms on Wall Street could strip America down like a stolen car and sell the parts?  So that Charlie Munger’s friends could make a fortune on Chinese investments and Klaus Schwab’s friends could push the West toward a technocratic dystopia more easily controlled?  So that the wealthiest in America could extract every last dollar from the mortgaged, indebted middle class?

NAFTA was sold as a “free trade” agreement that would slow inflation, decrease national debt, and end illegal immigration (because workers would remain south of the border).  Normalized trade relations with China were sold as a policy that would diminish the national security threat of the Chinese Communist Party.  How did those promises turn out?

Building an American future begins with revitalizing America’s builders.  Combined with deregulation, energy production, and tax cuts, that’s what Trump’s tariffs will do.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/04/trump_s_tariffs_tackle_clinton_s_china_carnage.html

DOGE filters down -- U.S. Attorney to probe billions lost to L.A. homeless industrial complex

 

By Monica Showalter

The one-party blue gang running Los Angeles better not make newly appointed U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli angry. They wouldn't like him when he's angry.

Essayli has a history of combativeness in the California statehouse towards thieves and wokesters over voter I.D. men using the little girls' restrooms, leftist spendathons, and other hot button issues.  He cut his political teeth in the Lake Elsinore area of Riverside County, which is rock-solid conservative. That made him just right to President Trump for the job of U.S. Attorney General for Central California, which includes Los Angeles.

Now with him on the job, we see this:

‼️ Wow - now that US Attorney @billessayli has joined forces with a very unhappy district judge Carter to investigate waste, fraud and criminal activity with LA’s homeless $, I expect they’ll find a lot of crime & not hesitate to lock people up.

If I were @MayorOfLA… https://t.co/wHjs33XwEm

— Houman David Hemmati, MD, PhD (@houmanhemmati) April 7, 2025

That's a good start. But he's got quite an Augean stable of corruption to work with.

In Los Angeles, the homelessness czar has resigned her position suddenly, against a backdrop of $2 billion unaccounted for.

According to the Los Angeles Times late last week:

Va Lecia Adams Kellum, the head of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, announced her resignation Friday, just days after the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted to strip her agency of more than $300 million and hundreds of workers. In a letter delivered to the agency’s board of commissioners Friday afternoon, Adams Kellum said that due to the board’s decision to shift key responsibilities from LAHSA to the county, “now is the right time for me to resign as CEO.”

She leaves behind this:

It's an absolute scandal that they have no idea where that cash went under this person's leadership.

The homeless are as numerous and miserable as ever, suggesting the cash probably didn't land their way.

Campaign coffers, luxury vacations, like state Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara has spent his tenure taking, or any of a number crony shovelouts may be likely places where it did, and Essayli is going to find it, DOGE-like in his doggedness.

It's telling that this person left office ahead of the time when she said she would, and right when Essayli took office.

It sounds like there may be fire where there's smoke in this festering corruption sump of a city.

It appears that Essayli, an unusual Republican who likes to fight leftists, and who has allied with Ric Grenell, has hit the ground running. Let's keep an eye on him, because he may rise to higher things if, like St. George, (his ancestral country of Lebanon's saint who's cherished by both Christians and Muslims,) he can take these monsters down.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/04/doge_spirit_moves_downstream_to_new_u_s_attorney_who_vows_to_probe_the_billions_lost_in_los_angeles_s_homeless_industrial_complex.html

Pacira Settles Patent Litigation Over EXPAREL With Fresenius

 Pacira BioSciences Inc. (PCRX) announced that it has settled its litigations with Fresenius Kabi USA, LLC, Jiangsu Hengrui Pharmaceuticals Co., Ltd., and eVenus Pharmaceuticals Laboratories Inc. related to patents for EXPAREL (bupivacaine liposome injectable suspension).

As part of the settlement, the companies will file Consent Judgments with the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and the United States District Courts for the District of New Jersey and the Northern District of Illinois that enjoin Fresenius from marketing generic bupivacaine liposome injectable suspension before the expiration of the patents-in-suit, except as provided for in the settlement.

Pacira has agreed to provide Fresenius with a license to Pacira's patents required to manufacture and sell certain volume-limited amounts of generic bupivacaine liposome injectable suspension in the United States beginning on a confidential date that is sometime in early 2030. The license will permit entry of generic bupivacaine liposome injectable suspension before the July 2, 2044 expiration date of the last-to-expire of Pacira's Orange Book-listed patents for EXPAREL.

The company noted that the agreed-upon volume-limited percentages are confidential, But the companies begin at a high-single-digit percentage of the total volumes distributed in the U.S. market and increase gradually in each 12-month period following the volume-limited entry date until reaching a percentage in the low thirties in 2033 and increasing modestly in each of the next two 12-month periods before reaching a maximum percentage in the high thirties of the total volumes distributed in the U.S. for the final three years of the agreement.

In addition, Pacira has agreed to provide Fresenius with a license to Pacira's patents required to manufacture and sell an unlimited quantity of generic bupivacaine liposome injectable suspension in the U.S. beginning no earlier than 2039.

https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/pacira-settles-patent-litigation-over-exparel-fresenius-kabi-jiangsu-hengrui-and-evenus

Chinese State Funds Plan to Buy Stocks as Market Rout Deepens

 

China’s state-backed funds are planning to buy local stocks in a bid to support the market, as an escalating trade war with the US erodes this year’s rally.

China Reform Holdings Corp. said it will spend 80 billion yuan ($10.9 billion) to increase holdings of shares in state-owned enterprises and technology firms as well as to buy exchange-traded funds. That followed word from sovereign funds Central Huijin Investment Ltd. and China Chengtong Holdings Group of equity purchases Monday.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-08/chinese-state-funds-plan-to-buy-stocks-as-market-rout-deepens