Exploring regulatory data sets of the Comirnaty vaccine - 13

Summing up

We started the Comirnaty series just after Easter with the intent of exploring what data regulators had in front of them when they made the decision to grant Comirnaty provisional registration in the middle of the Covid panic in December 2020.

Our decision was based on concerns by our reader ophthalmologist, James Jory, that the episodes of Bell’s Palsy he was seeing in his clinic were several times what he would see before vaccination was (to all effects and purposes) mandated.

The MHRA and Bell’s Palsy

We found some notable discrepancies between the UK regulators’ estimates of the incidence of Bell’s Palsy post-vaccination and the NHS Business Authority's inclusion of Bell’s Palsy in a list of “Conditions where causation was accepted but disablement was

assessed by the independent medical assessor as less than 60%”. We further found a higgledy piggledy list of recognised harms with estimates of incidence which varied from public body to public body.

We summarised this in Who is Afraid of Helen McArdle and James …