'Stuff that just happens to follow vaccination' is the new coincidence. More doublespeak from up top.

[Beachcomber]

Well you've got to give them points for creativity.

Forgot 'coincidence' it is so evocative of MMR last year.

"Events that happen to follow vaccination" are the new black of the vaccine industry, get with it folks.

Teen develops Guillian Barre after vaccination

I quote;

"There are events that follow vaccination. That?s what they are, they happened to follow vaccination."

Yes lady, that sounds like a pretty good definition of a vaccine reaction to me.

If it is true that the signs of GBS started "within hours" of vaccination, then it makes it very unlikely that the two are related causally. GBS takes far longer to develop; several days or weeks.

I guess this one in France is just a coincidence too then.

I'm afraid it's in French but you get the picture

Babelfish translation here

There are no case details to comment on.

At least high up doctors have been warned to be on the look out for cases of GBS following H1N1 vaccination.

The risk of GBS from flu itself is far greater than the tiny, tiny, risk (that does exist and no-one denies it does) from vaccination. you pay your money, you take your choice. i'm being vaccinated.

correlation and causation are not synonymous.

Crikey, they've had a lot of swine flu deaths in the states. That article says "more than 4,000".

Mso could you link to where you get the info that the risk from the vaccine is tiny and far greater from the virus. I would be really interested in something like that. Cheers.

Paisleyleaf the 4000 figure is the CDC estimate. These are not confirmed deaths.

sure:

www.factsandcomparisons.com/assets/hospitalpharm/IMM1.pdf

there's lots more on trip, pubmed and the like if you care to look in places which supply reliable infromation.

Thanks for the link Mso. I don't see any info in it about the currently used H1N1 vaccines but there was some interesting comments made about the last widely used swine flu vaccine.

The last (quoted) statement seems pretty sensible where it says that an elevated risk of GBS could be considered acceptable if the disease proves to be virulent with high mortality.

I don't think there's much to go on on Pubmed, etc about current H1N1 vaccine because their use in mass vaccination has only just begun so we don't have much data on the effects yet.

Quote from the interesting article you posted;

"For the 10 weeks following vaccine administration, the risk was found to be approximately 10 cases of GBS for every million recipients,an incidence rate seven times higher than that in unimmunized persons."

"With the luxury of more time,additional and more detailed analyses were performed. Published analyses found that swine-flu-vaccinated people were 4 to 7.6 times as likely to develop GBS in the 6 to 8 weeks after vaccination as unvaccinated people.
26?27,31,37?38,40?42 About 532 people had been vaccinated shortly before the onset of their GBS symptoms. Of these, 211 to 246 cases could be attributed to the vaccine over a 6-week period.The difference between 532 and 211 or 246 consists of the people who would have contracted GBS regardless of influenza vaccination. Which of the 532 people contracted GBS due to the vaccine and
which would have contracted GBS anyway cannot be known.The attributable risk of vaccine-related GBS in adults ranged from 5 to 12 cases per million vaccinations. In the end, most scientists who have studied the data conclude that the 1976 influenza vaccine and GBS were linked in a cause-and-effect manner. Most also conclude that had
an influenza epidemic materialized,this level of Guillain-Barré syndrome may well have been considered acceptable, in exchange for a lower death rate from influenza.But the elevated rate of GBS was not acceptable when the threatened pandemic did not materialize. The swine-flu vaccination program was abruptly terminated in mid-December 1976."

Just to be clear I am not trying to claim that GBS is a common adverse effect of vaccination. My point is that considering that it is a known side effect it seems concerning when medical biwigs claim that GBS cases after H1N1 vaccination are coincidences rather than stating that they could well be coincidences just as they could well not be.

then might i suggest you didn't read the article or the link you posted properly. as pointed out by the second post in this thread, GBS takes weeks to develop as it is a slow process of demyelination. development of GBS hours after the vaccine basically means it was a coincidence. it is biologically impossible for demyelination due to GBS to occur that quickly.

people are very poor at evaluating risk and the chance of coincidence. people develop GBS from causes other than flu vaccines. if you immunize enough people (or for that matter give them a sugar pill) then there will be some cases of temporal association of adverse reactions that have nothing to do with the intervention.

take the poor girl who died of a tumour after the HPV vaccine - complete coincidence but people find it hard to accept. that's why we have and need data to work from and not a collection of anecdotes.

conspiracy theories help no-one and frankly if scaremongering reduces the chance of someone being vaccinated, the chances are that it will increase that person's chance of dying. simple as.

The other thing you mentioned about there not being data on 'the current vaccine' is really a misunderstanding of how flu vaccines are developed - this vaccine has been developed in exactly the same way as every seasonal flu vaccine. there is never any population data on a particular flu vaccine before it is given (although this one has been more rigorously tested than it is most years) there is however decades of evidence that vaccines produced by this method are much, much safer than taking the risk of getting flu. all this media hype about it being 'rushed' is nonsense and frankly designed to sell newspapers rather than keep people safe.

I did read your link very carefully and found it very interesting. I was under the impression that GBS onset and severity varies enormously from patient to patient.

For example;

www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/gbs/gbs.htm

"Usually Guillain-Barré occurs a few days or weeks after the patient has had symptoms of a respiratory or gastrointestinal viral infection. Occasionally, surgery or vaccinations will trigger the syndrome. The disorder can develop over the course of hours or days, or it may take up to 3 to 4 weeks."

I fully understand how flu vaccines are developed but at the same type I fully understand that when the strain of a virus is changed in a vaccine, the reactivity of the vaccine can change. There have been both measles and mumps vaccines withdrawn for these very reasons. They were 'built' in exactly the same way as previous vaccines with years of use and yet their safety profiles were very different.

Why are you talking about conspiracy theories?

Sorry though you meant I didn't read your link carefully.

I did read the one I posted carefully too though .

It did say 'hours' although I understand from other articles that the symptoms which began hours after the vaccination were headaches and muscle spasms not actual paralysis.

The original link seems to be dead now I have to go out now but I'll try to find a replacment later for the sake of continuity.

you might find this one interesting too:

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19033158?dopt=AbstractPlus

"The relative incidence of Guillain-Barré syndrome within 90 days of vaccination was 0.76 (95% confidence interval: 0.41, 1.40). In contrast, the relative incidence of Guillain-Barré syndrome within 90 days of an influenzalike illness was 7.35 (95% confidence interval: 4.36, 12.38), with the greatest relative incidence (16.64, 95% confidence interval: 9.37, 29.54) within 30 days. The relative incidence was similar (0.89, 95% confidence interval: 0.42, 1.89) when the analysis was restricted to a subset of validated cases. The authors found no evidence of an increased risk of Guillain-Barré syndrome after seasonal influenza vaccine"

I'm talking about conspiracy theories because that's what your first post is. and your statement

"I quote;

"There are events that follow vaccination. That?s what they are, they happened to follow vaccination."

Yes lady, that sounds like a pretty good definition of a vaccine reaction to me."

belies a complete (and i suspect willful) misunderstanding of the difference between correlation and causation. and is simply wrong. one event following another is absolutely not in any way a 'definition' of a causal relationship. that's the whole bloody point. I twisted my ankle this morning after having a bacon sandwich. that doesn't mean that falling over is the definition of a bacon sandwich reaction.

Thanks for the link Mso, I've seen that one before. There certainly does seem to be a lot of contradictory info about this.

For example GBS is listed on the Novartis H1N1 vaccine package insert as an "Adverse Reactions Associated with Influenza Vaccination". It is also stated that "The 1976 swine influenza vaccine was associated with an increased frequency of Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS). Evidence for a causal relation of GBS with subsequent vaccines prepared from other influenza viruses is unclear."

The Institute of Medicine states on its website that "the evidence favored acceptance of a causal relationship between the 1976 Swine Influenza vaccine and GBS".

Now, I'm not saying that bacon sandwichs are related to twisted ankles, vaccine reactions or anything else because that, obviously, would be very very silly.

What I am saying is that here we have a relatively rare syndrome that has been associated with a certain vaccine and a teenager who has received a similar vaccine has just developed that relatively rare syndrome.

Considering that this syndrome is a documented possible side effect of this type of vaccine it seems reasonable to state that what happened to this boy is possibly a vaccine reaction. It seems, to me, less reasonable to say that his developing a documented side effect of this type of vaccine was a coincidence and more likely to be related to the bacon sandwich he ate at lunchtime.

Now we may well find out that this particular case of GBS does turn out to be a bacon sandwich reaction or due to a viral illness or similar. In the meantime it is entirely possibly that it is a vaccine reaction and it is scientifically dishonest to imply that that is not reasonable to come to this conclusion.

There has been a case in France too. The women developed GBS 6 days after H1N1 vaccination. In this article (sorry it's in French) they give some info about the US.

Thsy state that there are 5 cases of GBS following H1N1 vaccination which are being investigated in the US by the CDC.

It is also stated that Jordan McFarland (from the original link) had headaches and muscle weakness 24 hours after vaccination and that he was unable to walk one week later. (They also state that he should be able to walk again within 5 to 6 weeks.)