The Pandemrix vaccine against the latest pandemic (the swine flu) caused narcolepsy in some individuals -- seemingly with a propensity for affecting young people and possibly related to the choice of adjuvant.
We're in a similar situation now. Early vaccines may have side effects and a forced introduction of a vaccine may increase the risk.
"At the end of March 2011, an MPA press release stated: 'Results from a Swedish registry based cohort study indicate a 4-fold increased risk of narcolepsy in children and adolescents below the age of 20 vaccinated with Pandemrix, compared to children of the same age that were not vaccinated.' The same study found no increased risk in adults who were vaccinated with Pandemrix"
Your source is wrong. The Pandemrix swine flu vaccine caused narcolepsy in children which did not start showing up for a year after the first doses were administered, and it took authorities another year after that to acknowledge the link to the vaccine.
You don’t need to go so far back. The 2009 swine flu pandemic vaccine caused Narcolepsy in about 10 / 100 000 vaccinated, all of which were children aged 12-16 (which is not a group included in trials, by the way).
"Pandemrix was found to be associated with narcolepsy from observational studies, increasing the risk of narcolepsy by 5-14 times in children and 2-7 times in adults. The increased risk of narcolepsy due to vaccination in children and adolescents was around 1 incident per 18,400 doses."
If you don't have a large section of the population unvaccinated, you can't conclusively prove that the vaccine was the cause.
Actually what happened with the 2010 swine flu vaccine was that people developed narcolepsy starting about a year after the first shots were administered (many of them to people who were never at particularly high risk from the swine flu itself). It took about another year after those symptoms first arose for authorities to acknowledge the link to Pandemrix.
However, this does prove my point: The people who developed narcolepsy after this vaccine started showing symptoms one to two months after their vaccine.
“An increased risk of narcolepsy was found following vaccination with Pandemrix, a monovalent 2009 H1N1 influenza vaccine that was used in several European countries during the H1N1 influenza pandemic. This risk was initially found in Finland, and then other European countries also detected an association.”
> Pandemrix, a flu vaccine, caused a notable uptick in narcolepsy in Sweden, Finland and likely the UK.
"The increased risk of narcolepsy due to vaccination was 1 in 18400 or 0.005%."[1] Considering the fatality and long term disability rate of Covid, and the way testing and safety protocols are done for vaccines, I don't really see how there could be an unknown and unseen risk that would outweigh the risk of contracting Covid.
>In our paper, we show that the risk appears to be limited to only one vaccine (Pandemrix®). During the first year after vaccination, the relative risk of narcolepsy was increased 5 to 14-fold in children and adolescents and 2 to 7-fold in adults. The vaccine attributable risk in children and adolescents was around 1 per 18,400 vaccine doses. Studies from Finland and Sweden also appear to demonstrate an extended risk of narcolepsy into the second year following vaccination, but such conclusions should be interpreted with a word of caution due to possible biases.
Most well known is probably narcolepsy induced by Pandermix flu vaccine. [1] But in my understanding any vaccine can have side effects. When my kids get vaccinated I always have to sign a paper stating that I understand the risks of possible seizures, blood cloths, sudden death, etc. Even thou I understand that risks are very small it's always hard to read and sign something like that.
Not sure why the posts asking for vaccine risks are getting downvoted. Pandemrix, the vaccine for swine flu, caused a notable amount of narcolepsy cases in recipients here in FIN (notable here meaning the amount of yearly cases spiked by 3-4x) and as with anything that's taken quick to market there has to be some risk of overlooking some tail events somewhere.
It's not an anti-vaccine attitude, just healthy skepticism considering how much pressure there is to get this out and into distribution.
In 2018, a study team including CDC scientists analyzed and published vaccine safety data on adjuvanted pH1N1 vaccines (arenaprix-AS03, Focetria-MF59, and Pandemrix-AS03) from 10 global study sites. Researchers did not detect any associations between the vaccines and narcolepsy.
Incidence rate study data did not show a rise in the rate of narcolepsy following vaccination except in the one signaling country included (Sweden, which used Pandemrix).
Case-control analyses for Arepanrix-AS03 did not show evidence of an increased risk of narcolepsy.
Case-coverage analysis for Pandemrix-ASO3 in children in the Netherlands did not show evidence of an increased risk of narcolepsy, but the number of exposed cases was small (N=7).
Cases-control analysis for Focetria-MF59 did not show evidence of an increased risk of narcolepsy.
The swine flu that vaccine protected against also causes narcolepsy, in exactly the same genetically susceptible population, except more frequently and severely.
In other words those who got narcolepsy were nonetheless better off with the vaccine than if they had caught the flu.
I don't know how often this occurs. I know a specific case was Pandemrix, the vaccine administered in a few European nationas during the 2009 H1N1 outbreak, which seems to have increased the risk of narcolepsy especially for children [1,2].
Just because you heard it in a podcast, doesn't make it true.
Disclaimer: I'm not saying vaccines are bad or not to take them, I'm saying it's wrong to assume there are no risks.
> there has never in the history of vaccines been side effects that wouldn't be detectable at this stage
In Europe several years after the H1N1 Pandemic, it was found that people who had received the vaccine for it were contracting narcolepsy, especially children[1].
Research[2] into it has been unable to determine the exact cause[3], but the conclusion of the CDC is still "An increased risk of narcolepsy was found following vaccination with Pandemrix, a monovalent 2009 H1N1 influenza vaccine that was used in several European countries during the H1N1 influenza pandemic".
> [...] found a 6.6-fold increased risk among children and youths, resulting in 3.6 additional cases of narcolepsy per 100,000 vaccinated subjects. [...]
We're in a similar situation now. Early vaccines may have side effects and a forced introduction of a vaccine may increase the risk.
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