Does COVID-19 vaccination cause MS?
There are a few papers that rather infers it does, but it may be incidental.
Most of the MS-World have recieved a COVID-19 and boosters unless they are anti-Vaxxers.
So I wonder if I picked a day at random how many new cases of MS would occur in a month from that date?
Now I would be stupid to stay it does or it doesn’t and there have been a number of papers inferring relapses after vaccination, but if I look in the literature you can find the same claims for arthritis, vasculitis etc etc etc. However, I think we can say in the vast majority of people who are vaccinated do not develop MS within 3 weeks of vaccination as I guess about 80% of population have had one dose so thats about 50,000,000 people in UK to be conservative lets say 40,000,000 have had full dose. We are not in an MS epidemic.
What do others say
Stefanou MI, Palaiodimou L, Theodorou A, Christodoulou MV, Tzartos JS, Tzanetakos D, Kitsos D, Chondrogianni M, Zouvelou V, Dardiotis E, Tzavellas E, Syrigou E, Benetou V, Paraskevas GP, Tsiodras S, Tsivgoulis G, Giannopoulos S. Safety of COVID-19 vaccines in multiple sclerosis: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Mult Scler. 2023 Feb 1:13524585221150881
Nineteen observational studies comprising 14,755 MS patients who received 23,088 doses of COVID-19 vaccines were included. Mean age was 43.3 years (95% confidence interval (CI): 40-46.6); relapsing-remitting, secondary-progressive, primary-progressive MS and clinically isolated syndrome were diagnosed in 82.6% (95% CI: 73.9-89.8), 12.6% (95% CI: 6.3-20.8), 6.7% (95% CI: 4.2-9.9), and 2.9% (95% CI: 1-5.9) of cases, respectively. The pooled proportion of MS patients experiencing relapse at a mean time interval of 20 days (95% CI: 12-28.2) from vaccination was 1.9% (95% CI: 1.3%-2.6%; I2 = 78%), with the relapse risk being independent of the type of administered SARS-CoV-2-vaccine (p for subgroup differences = 0.7 for messenger RNA (mRNA), inactivated virus, and adenovector-based vaccines). After vaccination, transient neurological worsening was observed in 4.8% (95% CI: 2.3%-8.1%) of patients. Adverse events and serious adverse events were reported in 52.8% (95% CI: 46.7%-58.8%) and 0.1% (95% CI: 0%-0.2%) of vaccinations, respectively. (Now remember fever is a potential side-effect of vaccination and heat makes demyelinated nerves to stop working properly so it is not surprising that there may be some adverse effects but this is not a relapse)
Conclusion: COVID-19 vaccination does not appear to increase the risk of relapse and serious adverse events in MS. Weighted against the risks of SARS-CoV-2-related complications and MS exacerbations, these safety data provide compelling pro-vaccination arguments for MS patients.
Say no more.
My belief about spike protein and MS is that it does trigger MS relapses. The reasons behind this are several. 1 When people get ‘long CoVID’, it has been linked to EBV reactivation and EBV appears to be causal in MS. 2 CoVID-19 hospitalised me for 3 weeks. 3 Subsequently, Moderna SpikeVax hospitalised me for three days. You get more spike protein from infection than vaccine, hence the 7 fold difference between infection vs. vaccine. Pfizer CoVID vaccine failed to produce any antibody response due to Ocrelizumab, but left me feeling sufficiently unwell, with weakness, malaise, cough, headache and diarrhoea, that I felt compelled to complete a yellow card on 2 occasions. When they formulate influenza vaccine, they take a benign surface molecule and generate a vaccine from that. When they produced CoVID vaccines, they took the Spike protein, a protein that makes CoVID pathological, and made an immunisation from that. Antivaxxers seem to be blaming the mRNA vaccine technology for its shortcomings, but I suspect they’re misguided. A circumstantial bit of evidence is that Oxygen therapy helps both people with MS and long CoVID. ‘Circumstantial’ is not causation and it certainly doesn’t meet the Bradford-Hill criteria, but EBV and MS were considered to be circumstantially linked for decades, until the weight of evidence grew last year and now everybody seems to have accepted it.
Are we being too selective in our interpretation here and not sufficiently robust in our analysis? The paper notes serious “methodological issues” and goes on to note “vaccine induced transient neurological worsening in 4.8% of MS patients” (very high). No red flag there? How do we normally treat red flags? Also notes “an increased reactogenicity following administration of the second compared to the first dose, especially for mRNA vaccines”, which “exhibit additional properties of self-adjuvantation, with mRNA acting both as antigen and adjuvant that precipitates overt inflammatory responses. These results lend support to the assumption that immune reactions may trigger “Uhthoff’s phenomenon” in MS patients,
that in turn induces transient neurological worsening…particularly following
exposure to mRNA SARS-CoV-2 vaccines.” Combined with other recent research pointing to other auto-immune and fertility red flags, can they really conclude, objectively, that “these safety data provide compelling pro-vaccination arguments for MS patients”? Also, we have no long-term data, which used to be a minimum standard. As I say, sufficiently robust analysis?
Transient neurological worsening is NOT a relapse (the clue is in the word transient, which you can also see after an infusion of alemtuzumab hence the steroid co-administration) and probably similar to feeling a bit sh***y for a couple of days, which I certainly did after my last booster. It is very important to keep a sense of proportion unless you’re trying to sow panic and misinformation which I’m sure isn’t your intention but perhaps increased credulity is a by-product of COVID-19 😉 ?
Yes but transient or not transient, neurological worsening in a large number of people following the vaccines is not a red flag? That’s my point. In the context of a lack of longer-term safety data, it used to be a major red flag – it signified major potential problems down the line. Or is medical ethics 2023 just medicine without the ethics? That would certainly sow panic, that’s for sure. As I referenced above, if you, like me, are looking even at only peer-reviewed studies in the top journals, you should know that the number of red flags is so great that the above analysis looks like a vaccine sales pitch. But I know that you will be looking at and seeing, as I am, so much more than this – it is deeply distressing to just do a review of the published evidence in this area. That’s what makes the above Paper so bewildering for me. It’s like a see no evil approach to medicine – it used to be exactly the opposite.
You are honestly being unnecessarily alarmist, Kev and not for the first time.
“the spike protein produced in excess by human cells transfected with the mRNA vaccines, analogous to the mutated prion-like bacterial protein, could be released as amyloid fibrils and taken up by neurons expressing various amyloidogenic proteins, most notably the prion protein, acting as a seed. This could result in cytotoxicity and neurodegeneration, explaining many of the neurological symptoms observed as adverse reactions to the mRNA vaccines. In the remainder of this paper, we further develop this hypothesis based on extensive evidence from the research literature” -https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9922164/
Have you ordered that book yet, Kev?
Also I have to break it to you that speaking diplomatically, the journal that published this extremely hypothetical article isn’t exactly top notch with an impact factor of 1.5.
Also there’s a very good debunking of the vaccine misinformation b*****ks on page 9 of the latest issue of Private Eye. Available in all good newsagents Kev.
A lot of people, MS or no MS, get increased body temperature after vaccines (covid or not). And Uthoffs is triggered by what again? Oh right…
🙂
You should read this Kev.
This seemes particularly pertinent “Van der Linden has identified “six degrees of manipulation” – strategies that are used to fool people into believing the unbelievable. These include discrediting factual information using deflection and denial, and making emotional appeals to generate responses based on feelings instead of rational thoughts – for instance by exaggerating the risks of rare side effects from the Covid-19 vaccines.”
Cars and bloody dangerous though so we should all stop using them
1-2 million deaths a year and about 50 million injuries a year
https://www.brake.org.uk ›