Well, it’s important to distinguish between the vaccine itself causing the infection, and the vaccine making you more vulnerable to infection upon exposure to the flu virus.
Anti-vaxxers tend to conflate the two, or indeed claim outright that the vaccine itself infects you. Obviously, since the vaccine works with inactivated virus and virus fragments, we don’t think the vaccine itself is what infects you with the flu, you’d need the active virus for that, and it’s not in the vaccine.
But if, IF, the conclusion of the study us correct, that getting the vaccine makes you more vulnerable to becoming infected upon exposure to the virus, then I am really struggling to understand what the mechanism might be. I think this needs to be looked into ASAP.
Incidentally, I’ve heard forever people telling me (like Antoine here!), that they never had the flu, but got it when they got the vaccine. My MIL is an example, she reported that the one time she got the vaccine, she got the flu, but never all the years without the vaccine - we both laughed ruefully, at the bad luck coincidence (she believes in vaccines), we put it all down to unconnected chance. But now I wonder.
Myself, most of my life I didn’t get the flu vaccine, because I was underwhelmed by the relatively poor effectiveness, so why bother. I wasn’t opposed to the idea, just couldn’t be bothered. But as correlations started coming out about possible protection from dementia, I started getting the flu vaccine. No flu so far. But I’m somewhat concerned, because there also seems to be research indicating that getting infected with respiratory viruses is associated increased dementia.
Hmm. Quite some dilemma. Getting the flu vaccine might cut the odds of my getting dementia. But it may also increase my odds of getting the flu, which in turn might increase my odds of getting dementia. Not a good year, I’d say. Get the vaccine, and then move to a desert island?
