A 60-year-old woman with a history of migraines who received the Johnson & Johnson one-dose COVID-19 vaccine developed Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) 10 days after receiving the vaccine in a clinical trial in Boston.
The patient recovered from GBS after intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) treatment, said Dr. Anthony Amato of Harvard Medical School in Boston, adding that it was unlikely the vaccine caused GBS. A test to detect SARS-CoV-2 was repeated twice during the patient’s illness, but both tests were negative. After receiving the two-day IVIG treatment, the patient’s strength improved and she was discharged to rehabilitation 10 days after admission, according to the case study.
"About 10 to 20 per million people get Guillain-Barré every year," Amato said. "Approximately 1 billion people worldwide are expected to be vaccinated against COVID-19. There could be thousands of cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome that will occur only by coincidence."
However, health officials writing in the journal Cureus in February also recorded a case of GBS after the 82-year-old patient received one dose of the Pfizer vaccine. And, in Houston, a teenager reported that he, too, came down with GBS after his vaccine. In December 2020 a young TikTok user also reported GBS after the vaccine.
And while health officials continue to insist that a certain number of GBS cases are going to happen in any given year, and that they can’t definitively connect the vaccine to the GBS, earlier in 2020, in June, The New England Journal of Medicine discussed five reported cases of GBS that occurred after the vaccine between February 28, 2020, and March 21, 2020, in northern Italy.
SOURCES:
MedPage Today April 7, 2021
Cureus February 18, 2021
Click2 Houston April 5, 2021
Health December 23, 2020
NEJM June 25, 2020