It is a patient from Charleroi who writes to us: “Say that there are no serious side effects from vaccines is wrong. Even so rare […] ask the specialists to talk to you about Guilain-Barré syndrome and its consequences.”
This spectator tells us to have lived it following the flu vaccine at the end of October 2010. He was hospitalized in a state of severe paralysis 10 days later, spent 5 months in intensive care, then, a month of revalidation at the hospital. hospital, without counting four months of external revalidation. He attributes this disease to the vaccine given previously. He’s quite traumatized by it, and that’s understandable.
Guillain-Barré, what is it?
According to the World Health Organization, Guillain-Barré syndrome is a rare condition in which the patient’s immune system attacks peripheral nerves.
The cause of the syndrome is unknown. Patients have often (70% of cases) previously triggered an infection bacterial or viral: gastrointestinal infection due to Campylobacter bacteria, respiratory tract infection, mononucleosis, or cytomegalovirus …
Guillain-Barré syndrome is triggered “more rarely by vaccination or surgery“, so only after a treatment that acts on the immune system. Across Belgium, this syndrome strikes 100 to 200 people per year. It is estimated that 1 to 1.9 people per 100,000 population contract the disease each year.
In countries affected by Zika virus infection, there has been an unexpected increase in the number of cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome. The most likely explanation given the available data on Zika virus infection outbreaks and Guillain-Barré syndrome is that Zika virus infection is a trigger for Guillain-Barré syndrome.
It is a disease of autoimmune origin (the immune system turns on itself). There is no cure for Guillain-Barré syndrome, but, again according to the WHO, available therapies can relieve symptoms and reduce the duration of the disease.
Vaccine and Guillain-Barré?
Has there been a clear correlation between vaccine and Guillain-Barré syndrome so far? We asked for the opinion of Eric Muraille, immunologist at the Free University of Brussels and FNRS researcher. “To my knowledge“, he said,”the only case where it was clearly established a correlation between Guillain-Barré and vaccination was during a vaccination against the influenza virus in the United States in 1976. 450 cases were observed following the vaccination of a quarter of the US population, which is roughly 1 case per 110,000 people.”
A serious disease like this, after a vaccine, so it happens very, very rarely, and it’s totally undetectable in a phase 3 clinical study, like those of Pfizer-BioNtech or AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford , even if the cohorts are 20,000 or more than 30,000 volunteers. A frequency of 1 in 100,000 is only detectable during mass vaccination.
Pfizer and rare cases
The Food an Drug Administration (FDA), the US regulatory body, yesterday released a detailed report on its Pfizer-BioNtech Phase 3 Clinical Trial Data Study.
Apart from the usual side effects of a vaccine, the report mentions 0.5% of cases of people with serious medical problems during the clinical trial. However, this rate is exactly the same as in the placebo group. There is therefore no reason to believe that these diseases are due to the vaccine.
The report mentions four cases of Bell’s palsy, a condition that affects the facial muscles temporarily (4 in the vaccinated group, zero in the placebo group), but according to the FDA, this “does not represent a frequency above that found in the general population“The FDA, however, recommends specific vigilance.
The US Medicines Agency also notes that there were 8 cases of appendicitis in people vaccinated and 4 in the placebo group, but that these diseases are not considered to be related to the vaccine.
Broken down new car syndrome
If a serious disease problem occurs during a mass vaccination, inevitably, each person who will develop a serious disease will attribute it to the vaccine. A temporal sequence, however, does not imply causality.
It is therefore necessary to look if there is a visible numerical effect on the whole population: has the frequency of the pathology changed significantly in the country? If not, there is no evidence of a cause and effect relationship with the vaccine.
It turns out that this statistical “group” view is very difficult to accept for patients who have had a serious illness which they attribute to the vaccine. For them, the link is obvious. From a scientific, statistical, and community perspective, serious side effects are very rare and never call into question the cost-benefit ratio of vaccines.
Risk perception bias
Imagine buying a new car, explains Eric Billy, immuno-oncologist in Strasbourg, and member of the collective “On the side of science“which intends to share and popularize scientific knowledge and fight against obscurantism.”If you break down with your new car, are you never going to buy a new car again? Sometimes a new car has an engine problem“.
“Likewise, car accidents are very common”, explains Eric Muraille, “but the Belgians continue to roll”. “This is the risk vis-à-vis a common event, which is underestimated, while the risk vis-à-vis a very rare accident (after having been vaccinated) is overvalued “.
What to call into question our biases of perception in relation to vaccines.
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