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Amid a significant spike in influenza cases across the United States, Mehmet Oz, the current administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), is downplaying the importance of flu vaccinations, suggesting to the public, wrongly, that this year’s shot is ineffective.
Oz made the comments in an appearance on Newsmax last week.
“Every year, there is a flu vaccine, it doesn’t always work very well,” Oz claimed. “That’s why it’s been controversial of late. But like many illnesses, the best news out there is that you can take care of yourself so that when you do end up running into the flu, you can overwhelm it.”
Oz then pushed questionable “Make America Healthy Again” strategies for dealing with the flu, advising the public to get “sunlight,” include Vitamin D in their diets, or take zinc supplements to possibly shorten the duration of the flu. He also called on Americans to “eat the right food” and engage in physical activity.
While eating healthy and exercising are good advice in general, Oz’s downplaying of vaccines has concerned many health experts. Notably, his recommendation of zinc — which has been shown in some studies to help boost the immune system — came without dosage recommendations, which could potentially lead to overdoses by viewers unaware of the proper dosage. Consuming too much zinc can lead to serious complications, including the same flu-like symptoms people may be trying to treat.
Oz has a history of providing faulty or dubious medical advice. His recommendation to take supplements echoes President Donald Trump’s promotion of untested strategies during the coronavirus pandemic, such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, two “remedies” that turned out to have no effect on treating the virus and led to overdoses, including thousands of deaths, throughout the world. Oz’s comments are also similar to those made by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. earlier this year, in which he touted Vitamin A and cod liver oil as possible treatments for measles, leading to overdoses from those remedies in children throughout the country.
Several medical experts, including Trump’s first surgeon general Jerome Adams, spoke out against Oz’s claims, reiterating that it’s still important for Americans to get a flu vaccine this year, even with the new strain.
“Even in mismatched years, flu vaccines provide cross-protection because the strains are related,” Adams said on social media, adding that “mismatched vaccines can still reduce lab-confirmed flu risk by around 50-60 percent overall and are particularly good at preventing severe outcomes like hospitalization and death.”
A fact-check from Indian news site The Week notes that research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as well as multiple studies elsewhere, shows that “seasonal flu vaccines consistently reduce the risk of severe illness, hospitalization, intensive care admission, organ failure, and death, even in seasons when the vaccine is not a perfect match for circulating strains.”
Ashish Jha, the former dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, also touted the importance of getting vaccinated, even if the shot is not a complete match to the current flu strain.
“You still get about a third of lower chance of getting infected” from the mismatched vaccine, Jha conceded. “But where the benefit of the vaccine is clear is in preventing ER visits, hospitalizations, and obviously the thing we care most about, which is deaths.”
New CDC estimates about this year’s flu season were released on Monday, showcasing numbers up to the final week of 2025. According to those figures, there have already been 120,000 hospitalizations this year, as well as 5,000 deaths from the flu this season. At this same time last year, those numbers were nearly half, with only 63,000 hospitalizations recorded and just 2,700 flu-related deaths at that point.
It’s possible the hospitalization and death rates are higher this year due to fewer people getting vaccinated, as around 13 million fewer flu vaccine doses were administered this year compared to last.
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