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ABC health expert Norman Swan admitted Covid vaccines produced unexpected side effects but sees them as akin to “winning the lottery three times in your life”.
Dr Swan was commenting on the largest ever study on adverse reactions to Covid vaccines which was published last week.
“They discovered side effects that they weren’t expecting and they showed up like a sign,” Dr. Swan told ABC interviewer Jeremy Fernandez on Monday.
However, Dr. Swan emphasized that the side effects seen in the 99 million study subjects who received shots from Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca were “rare.”
ABC health expert Norman Swan admitted there were unexpected side effects from the Covid vaccines but said they were rare.
He said Guillain-Barré syndrome was a side effect of the AstraZeneca vaccine that received special attention in the study.
He described it as a “descending paralysis of the body that affects the nervous system.”
“Usually in most people it is a temporary phenomenon, but it can be quite serious at the time,” Dr. Swan said.
An unexpected side effect of the Moderna vaccine was acute disseminated encephalomyelitis.
“So this is essentially a brain inflammation that is typically seen in children, but in this case in older people, mostly between the ages of 20 and 60,” Dr. Swan said.
‘He described the condition as ‘self-limiting and quite unpleasant.’
Dr Swan said this condition was still extremely rare, with only seven cases seen among 10 million injections.
He compared the chance of getting it to “winning the biggest lottery three times in your life.”
When asked how applicable the study was to Australians, Dr Swan said it included Australians and people from similar countries, such as Canada.
The largest study ever conducted on Covid vaccine side effects found rare conditions attributable to the Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca shots.
Dr Swan has been a strong advocate of receiving Covid vaccines despite initially dismissing their likely effectiveness and saying those who received them were “guinea pigs”.
In July 2022, the Scottish-born medical commentator revealed that he had contracted Covid for the second time despite receiving four injections.
The study Dr. Swan cited involved an international coalition of vaccine experts looking for 13 medical conditions among 99 million vaccine recipients in eight countries.
They confirmed that shots made by Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca are linked to a significantly increased risk of five medical conditions, including Guillain-Barré syndrome.
But the study also warned of several other disorders that they said warranted further investigation, including links between a brain inflammation condition and the Moderna shot.
The increased risk of 12 conditions that could be linked to various Covid vaccines. Among the most concerning are inflammation of the heart muscle and inflammation of the brain.
However, the team says the absolute risk of developing either condition remains small.
They said 13 billion vaccine doses had been administered and there were only 2,000 cases of all the conditions.
Their research was published in the journal. Vaccine.