The
Daily Mail reported on letters sent to 600 neurologists in the UK by its Health Protection Agency, asking them to be observant for, and immediately report, cases of Guillain-Barre Syndrome [GBS].
The letter is a tacit acknowledgment of the risk of using an untested vaccine with novel ingredients. But it also indicates that the UK's health services are cognizant of the risks and are taking them seriously, setting up improved surveillance so that if the vaccine does cause Guillain-Barre, vaccinations can be stopped promptly. Bravo.
However, the risk does not begin and end with Guillain Barre Syndrome, as Dr. Tom Jefferson, head of the Cochrane Collaboration vaccine group pointed out in the article. Cochrane performs meta-analyses of the entire world literature on medical therapies. Unfortunately, Cochrane has not found
any literature on the squalene-containing adjuvants set to be used in some (most?) swine flu vaccines:
‘New vaccines never behave in the way you expect them to. It may be that there is a link to GBS, which is certainly not something I would wish on anybody.
‘But it could end up being anything because one of the additives in one of the vaccines is a substance called squalene, and none of the studies we’ve extracted have any research on it at all.’
That is the bigger problem: the potential variety of adverse reactions to the vaccine is very large, and it will be very difficult to sort out quickly (before tens or hundreds of millions have been vaccinated) which might be vaccine-related.
[Just an fyi--anthrax vaccine is also believed to cause GBS, and you shouldn't take it if you have ever had GBS, according to the label .]
The letter is a tacit acknowledgment of the risk of using an untested vaccine with novel ingredients. But it also indicates that the UK's health services are cognizant of the risks and are taking them seriously, setting up improved surveillance so that if the vaccine does cause Guillain-Barre, vaccinations can be stopped promptly. Bravo.
However, the risk does not begin and end with Guillain Barre Syndrome, as Dr. Tom Jefferson, head of the Cochrane Collaboration vaccine group pointed out in the article. Cochrane performs meta-analyses of the entire world literature on medical therapies. Unfortunately, Cochrane has not found any literature on the squalene-containing adjuvants set to be used in some (most?) swine flu vaccines:
That is the bigger problem: the potential variety of adverse reactions to the vaccine is very large, and it will be very difficult to sort out quickly (before tens or hundreds of millions have been vaccinated) which might be vaccine-related.
[Just an fyi--anthrax vaccine is also believed to cause GBS, and you shouldn't take it if you have ever had GBS, according to the label .]