Odds On

So now we are told that the Astrazeneca vaccine could cause Guillain Barre syndrome.

AstraZeneca‘s Covid vaccine may trigger a nerve disorder in ‘very rare’ cases, the EU’s vaccine watchdog has said.

The European Medicines Agency said today 833 cases of Guillain-Barre syndrome had been reported worldwide out of 592million doses dished out.

It said the overall risk of suffering the syndrome after being vaccinated with AstraZeneca was less than one in 10,000.

I had a friend die of this back in the late eighties. A fit, healthy man. Got a dose of flu and never got up again.  On balance a risk of this at 0.01% is in fact lower than the risk of dying from covid at around 1%. However, this is a fairly short term analysis. I wonder how it will pan out in the long term? Also, if I don’t have the vaccine and I don’t catch covid, my risk is now zero.

The whole thing is a juggling act of balancing risk – bearing in mind that contrary to the scare stories, the risk either way is low – very low. So take your pick, frankly.

4 Comments

  1. Last time I checked there had been almost 400 cases of Guillain-Barré reported post-injabulation. This is a syndrome with a fatality rate of 5% – probably 20 times that from/with Covid-19.

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