Medical Science: COVID-19 - Should Cases of Guillain-Barré Make a Difference

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Category: Medical Science

Published on Tuesday, 13 July 2021 11:36

Written by Dr. Jane M. Orient, M.D.,

The FDA is adding a new warning for the Johnson & Johnson COVID jab because of 100 preliminary reports of Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) after the administration of 12.8 million doses. Of these reports, 95 were serious and required hospitalization.

The FDA statement also said there was one death. If you haven't yet gotten the jab, should the recent reports of Guillain Barré affect your decision?

Most people fully recover from GBS, but some never fully regain their strength or fine motor skills. It may begin with mild weakness and progress to paralysis of the respiratory muscles, so that artificial ventilation is required. Patients may spend a month or more in the ICU and months in rehabilitation. They may face huge medical bills—the jab is "free," but care of complications is not.

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"Only" one case in 128,000 may be called "rare," and it might not have been caused by the jab. Each year in the United States, an estimated 3,000 to 6,000 people develop the illness. But in 1976, swine flu vaccines were stopped for one case of GBS in 100,000 doses.

"Available data do not show a pattern suggesting a similar increased risk of Guillain-Barré with the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines," states the Washington Post. "More than 321 million doses of those vaccines have been administered in the United States."

However, as of today, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) contains reports of 9,048 deaths, 7,463 persons disabled, and 26,818 hospitalizations.

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The more user-friendly British Yellow Card System contains reports of 40 cases of GBS with two deaths, and 43,738 "nervous system disorders" with 43 deaths for the Pfizer product. For Moderna, there was only one nonfatal case of GBS listed and 3,331 "nervous system disorders" with two deaths.

"Federal health officials have repeatedly emphasized that the benefits of the coronavirus inoculations far outweigh potential risks," says the Washington Post. But on the individual level, the calculation is not simply population-wide reported COVID deaths vs. reported vaccine deaths. Issues are:

• What is the risk of getting COVID in my circumstances and location?
• What is the risk of complications for a person of my age and health status?
• What is the risk of breakthrough cases? We need to know the cycle threshold (Ct) to judge whether diagnostic accuracy is comparable for persons with or without the jab.
• What is the true level of complications? Might there have been 90,000 deaths if only 10% are reported to VAERS?
• How do we distinguish deaths FROM vs. WITH COVID or vaccine? Is it the same way for both?

Some would like to punish those who decide that for them, the risk of the jab exceeds the benefit. Dr. Leana Wen of CNN, former head of Planned Parenthood, wants to make the choice of being unvaccinated hard and unduly burdensome. This is presumably to protect the public from catching the virus from an unvaccinated person. However, Moderna and Pfizer vaccine trials "have explicitly acknowledged that their gene therapy technology has no impact on viral infection or transmission whatsoever and merely conveys to the recipient the capacity to produce an S1 spike protein."

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For further information on physicians' opinions and first-hand reports on adverse reactions by patients, family members, and physicians, see links in AAPS survey results: Majority of Physicians Decline COVID Shots, according to Survey.

Jane M. Orient, M.D. obtained her undergraduate degrees in chemistry and mathematics from the University of Arizona in Tucson, and her M.D. from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1974. She completed an internal medicine residency at Parkland Memorial Hospital and University of Arizona Affiliated Hospitals and then became an Instructor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine and a staff physician at the Tucson Veterans Administration Hospital. She has been in solo private practice since 1981 and has served as Executive Director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) since 1989.

She is currently president of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness. She is the author of YOUR Doctor Is Not In: Healthy Skepticism about National Healthcare, and the second through fifth editions of Sapira's Art and Science of Bedside Diagnosis published by Wolters Kluwer. She authored books for school children, Professor Klugimkopf's Old-Fashioned English Grammar and Professor Klugimkopf's Spelling Method, published by Robinson Books, and coauthored two novels published as Kindle books, Neomorts and Moonshine. 

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More than 100 of her papers have been published in the scientific and popular literature on a variety of subjects including risk assessment, natural and technological hazards and non-hazards, and medical economics and ethics. She is the editor of AAPS News, the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness Newsletter, and Civil Defense Perspectives, and is the managing editor of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.

If you would like to discuss these issues, contact me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or (520) 323-3110. Jane M. Orient, M.D., Executive Director, Association of American Physicians and Surgeons