Study Finds COVID Shots Harm Kidneys

A new retrospective cohort study of nearly 2.9 million adults using the TriNetX global health database—a large, privacy-compliant network of real-world clinical data from major health care organizations across multiple countries—found that individuals who received an mRNA COVID-19 shot experienced significantly higher rates of acute kidney injury and need for dialysis over a 12-month period compared to matched unvaccinated controls, and the elevated risk continued to climb throughout the full year of follow-up with no indication of slowing.¹

Published Oct. 27, 2025 in the International Journal of Medical Sciences, the study also identified Pfizer’s mRNA Comirnaty shots as showing the strongest association with kidney damage, including an unexpected increase in all-cause mortality among Pfizer recipients specifically. “Pfizer (BioNTech) recipients showed an elevated risk of death compared to unvaccinated controls — even after all early post-vaccination deaths were excluded from analysis,” epidemiologist Nicolas Hulscher, MPH, said in a Substack piece analyzing the study. “The study’s three-month exclusion window conceals immediate fatalities, meaning the true mortality burden is almost certainly greater than reported.”^{1 2}

After adjusting for age, sex, race, comorbidities, medications, and healthcare utilization, the Comirnaty vaccinated group showed a 20 percent higher incidence of acute kidney injury and an 84 percent higher incidence of need for dialysis, with both risks rising progressively over time. The findings suggest a measurable association between COVID vaccination and subsequent renal dysfunction, leading the study authors to recommend routine renal monitoring for mRNA COVID shot recipients and to call for further investigation into the underlying mechanisms. The study found:

Given that both COVID-19 infection and renal dysfunction affect many people and can cause severe complications, including mortality, the relationship between COVID-19 vaccination and renal dysfunction merits investigation … Consequently, periodic renal examination may be advisable for patients who received a COVID-19 vaccine.¹

Unvaccinated Comparison Group Exceptionally Healthy

Notably, the retrospective cohort study’s unvaccinated comparison group was exceptionally healthy, in that it was restricted to individuals with “no reported concerns during general examinations and no suspected or reported diagnoses from 2022–2023,” meaning they were seen only for routine checkups and had no active poor health conditions entered into their medical record. They were also required to have no hospital admissions, no Acute Kidney Injury (AKI), no chronic kidney disease, no dialysis, and no COVID diagnosis within the pre-vaccination assessment period. In other words, the unvaccinated comparison group was systematically healthier, with fewer comorbidities and fewer opportunities for clinical complications.

Yet even against this unusually low-risk baseline, the vaccinated group still experienced a 20 percent higher incidence of acute kidney injury and a staggering 84 percent higher incidence of dialysis over 12 months. That a carefully screened, exceptionally healthy unvaccinated cohort experienced significantly less renal dysfunction adds weight to the observed association and suggests that the kidney risks associated with mRNA COVID shots may be more pronounced than earlier, shorter-term safety reviews have indicated.¹

Worldwide Spike in Kidney Injury Part of a Wider Pattern in mRNA COVID Shot Recipients

A separate 2025 Scientific Reports analysis of more than 120 million safety reports from 150 countries found that COVID mRNA shots had the highest disproportionate reporting of acute kidney injury, glomerulonephritis, or GN (inflammation of the kidney’s filters), and tubulointerstitial nephritis (inflammation of the kidney’s plumbing and surrounding tissue) of all vaccines evaluated, with reports rising sharply worldwide beginning in 2020, around the time the mRNA COVID shots became available and widely administered.³

The study also noted that these kidney injuries rarely occurred in isolation: AKI cases after receipt of mRNA COVID shots frequently appeared alongside neurological complications, arrhythmias, coronary events, and other inflammatory conditions. As the authors explained, “AKI frequently occurs in the context of a multi-system disease,” highlighting that the renal signal is part of a broader, multi-organ pattern documented across multiple post-marketing studies. Taken together, the global pharmacovigilance data and the new TriNetX cohort findings point to a consistent renal safety signal surfacing across both international surveillance and large-scale real-world clinical data.³

EMA Investigated Link Between mRNA COVID Shots and Kidney Disorders in 2021

The 2.9-million-person study comes over four years after the European Medicines Agency (EMA) announced in August 2021 they would be investigating a possible link between the mRNA COVID biologics developed by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna/NIAID and two kidney disorders known as glomerulonephritis (GN) and nephrotic syndrome (characterized by damage to the glomeruli—the kidney’s tiny filters—that causes a large amount of protein to leak from the blood into the urine).

According to the Cleveland Clinic, GN can develop secondary to endocarditis (infection of the heart valves), other viral infections, diseases that inflame the blood vessels, or autoimmune conditions such as lupus—further demonstrating that the kidney signal is part of a bigger, multi-organ pattern of inflammatory or immune processes.⁴

Also in 2021, the Cleveland Clinic denied a nine-year-old boy with only one kidney a life-saving transplant because he had not received the COVID shot. At the time, an investigation by The Epoch Times revealed a contradiction embedded in existing hospital policy: organs from unvaccinated deceased donors were routinely accepted, yet unvaccinated living donors and unvaccinated recipients were denied medical care. The very product a child was required to receive as a condition for obtaining a life-saving kidney has since been linked, in multiple large-scale studies, to sharply increased rates of acute kidney injury, dialysis, and other forms of renal impairment—conditions that are well-established predictors of increased mortality. The expanding body of real-world research underscores the importance of evidence-based informed consent and the need for hospital policies to be regularly updated to reflect emerging safety data.⁵

Kidney Signal One of Seven Major Injury Patterns Linked to mRNA COVID Shots Over the Past Year

Over the past year, large-scale post-marketing studies have identified at least seven major categories of clinically significant injury following receipt of mRNA COVID shots: cardiovascular inflammation and increased cardiac deaths, neurological complications, autoimmune activation, renal dysfunction, reproductive harms including late-term pregnancy loss, elevated cancer incidence, and ophthalmic changes.^{6 7 8 9}

To date, no public health agency, including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), or the World Health Organization (WHO), has recommended routine renal monitoring after mRNA vaccination. “As more disturbing data emerge week after week, the scientific record is becoming impossible to bury—and the future legal reckoning for those who kept these mRNA products on the market despite clear warning signs grows ever more severe,” Hulscher said of the findings. ²

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