But, at a time when ironies and mistaken assumptions were making a shambles of the swine flu vaccine, the secret irony of the Guillain-Barré link was perhaps the wryest one. The whole alarm came about because the Minnesota doctor who first reported a flu shot patient who got the disease had misheard an audiotape. He thought the tape warned that Guillain-Barré syndrome might follow flu shots. In fact it said just the opposite. It had used the disease as an example of how a faulty association could be drawn between a disease and the vaccine if, by chance, a person who had had the vaccine
...more
