I’ve been nothing but impressed with how Ontario is functioning, but my evidence for that is limited to anecdotes from my wife’s visit and my own visit to the downtown Toronto location.

I was especially impressed when I showed up, expecting to wait for two hours, only to be free to leave in under 30 minutes.

I am skeptical of wikipedia’s claim of 25 death attributed to the vaccine…the 3 citations don’t specifically mention that number (from the abstracts), they just quote one of the authors. Don’t get me wrong it might be true. But where does he get that number, if he actually said that quote? If he got that number from the US VAERS database, it’s probably a wrong number since that database is only useful for temporal association, not causal.

I think we agree here that vaccines are very safe. and relating to GBS, it’s pretty established that the flu causes way more cases of GBS than vaccine. Vaccines have been proven that they DECREASE incidence of GBS.

Way to go to reference Neurologica and SBM posts. They’re really informative. They should be read by all people who are undecided about getting the H1N1 vaccine. Deetee has another great post on vaccines and GBS here: ( http://www.layscience.net/node/625 )

And for a more “sciency” review, go here: ( http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/339/sep09_1/b3577?view=long&pmid=19740925#REF16 )

Oh and big ups to this post’s author, I feel the exact same way. People seem to make their minds up more from facebook or youtube these days. That’s just effed up.

http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=784

Steve Novella, my favourite neurologist, about the flu vaccine and GBS

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swine_flu which has some decent citations.

Did you read the summary on the article you linked to at Pubmed?

“The evidence for a causal association is strongest for the swine influenza vaccine that was used in 1976-77. Studies of influenza vaccines used in subsequent years, however, have found small or no increased risk of GBS.”

There’s a decent amount of correlation and plenty of study into the cause of GBS; enough so that even my favourite doctor of infectious diseases (everyone has oa favourite one of those, right?) and my favourite neurologist don’t have any problem linking GBS to the 1976 flu vaccine. I’m not suggesting that the flu vaccine causes GBS – Dr. Crislip in the piece I link below admits that the REASON for the link isn’t clear, but it’s clear that there was a link that was peculiar to that instance.

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=2040

Seriously, go read that – he has an excellent podcast too, in case you want to learn about all the invisible things that can kill us in this world… Well, two, actually; Pusscast and Quackcast.

Vaccines carry risk, and it’s a trick of statistics that the anti-vaxxers use all the time; MORE PEOPLE DIED FROM THE VACCINE in 1976 THAN DIED FROM THE FLU! Technically true, but it’s a lie of omission, where they don’t mention that only one person is known to have died from the flu…

I believe that you asked for an example of a vaccination program that has “killed multiple people.” Multiple means “more than one,” and I would hazard a guess that ALL vaccination programs have killed more than one person.

You read my article about pedantry earlier today, right?

There is no proof that the 76 variant vaccine caused GBS of which the 25 people died. You can’t say they died of something that is unproven. That’s bad science. It’s suspect yes, proven no.

The actual facts are that 1 person more died of H1N1 in 76 than of the vaccine.

I once saw an estimate of ~25 people having died from the ’76 vaccine (not counting GBS or other issues); and 25 is definitely higher than the 1 that is attributed to dying from the ’76 flu.

On 11.06.09 xinit wrote these pithy words:

I’ll answer that one… The 1976 flu vaccine actually has more deaths attributed to it than to the actual flu that year. That’s only because there was only ONE death attributed to that year’s “swine” flu.

How many have died from H1N1 already?

Wait now, the 1976 flu vaccine killed more than the 6000+ linked H1N1 deaths?

115 Canadian Deaths as of Nov 5th.

In July CBC reports 49 deaths and 10,000 H1N1 Incidents in an article. There were 211 deaths in the US by that point linked to H1N1 exclusively.

Contrast against the deaths from the 1976 swine flu vaccine… none known. There may be a link between that vaccine and Guillain-Barré syndrome where 500 cases probably caused by the vaccine, of which 25 people died. Though no definitive proof has ever surfaced to prove the link between vaccine and GBS.

Citations:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19388722
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_swine_flu_outbreak
http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2009/07/17/who-swine-flu-counting.html
http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/alert-alerte/h1n1/surveillance-eng.php

Mostly healthy adults, a handful of kids. (from globe and mail, and that’s as of Oct 24th so probably more now.)

How many have died from H1N1 already?