Every now and then there's a vaccine safety scare, and the results are disastrous for public health. Pertussis and 'brain damage'; MMR and autism; hepatitis B vaccine and multiple sclerosis. Did the last one surprise you? Vaccine scares are surprisingly country specific. Only in the UK did we worry about pertussis and brain damage, or about MMR; only in France were there popular concerns about hep B and multiple sclerosis (see this paper for some background and follow up).
This paper uses the nation-wide system of vaccine adverse event reporting to look at HPV vaccine in the USA.
Two things strike me. Firstly, it gives some perspective on other vaccine scares. When you do anything to millions of people, someone deaths are going to happen in the subsequent few weeks. In this case, 32 girls died after HPV vaccination. There hasn't (as far as I know) been an outcry, and rightly so: but what must the parents have thought, especially for the the small number labelled as 'unknown cause'? Secondly, the reporting system is designed to be very inclusive, so any report is accepted, even one found during this research to be at fifth hand.The VAERS was also used to document the association between the flu vaccine used in 1976 and Guillain Barre syndrome.
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