H1N1 flu vaccine causes permanent narcolepsy

California has passed an extreme vaccination mandate, but ExtremeTech reports:

These days, it’s easy to be dismissive of anti-vaccine headlines. Long content to be headed by Jenny McCarthy and disgraced researchers, the so-called “anti-vaxxers” have produced so much nonsense in their ill-advised quest to end routine vaccination that many are quick to jump to an equally reflexive conclusion: all vaccines are inherently safe. But the reality is that vaccines are medicines like any other, foreign substances introduced into the body specifically because the body will react powerfully to them. Many vaccines are thrown out during testing because they turn out to do more harm than we can abide. Even so, the screening process isn’t perfect, and clinical trials don’t necessarily capture every single low-probability reaction. This week, a major study in Science Transitional Medicine shows how a vaccine called Pandemrix really may cause narcolepsy. This report is different from an earlier 2013 study on Pandemrix (published in the same journal) that claimed to find a link between the vaccine and narcolepsy, but was retracted a short time after publication. ...

This week’s study changes that. The seeming cause is not mercury poisoning, or any of the other thoroughly discredited “links” between childhood vaccines and autism, but rather goes back to the very mechanism of any vaccine’s useful function: immune response. Vaccines stimulate antibodies and essentially prime the immune system to deal with a later viral invasion, but clinical testing may have underestimated the intensity of Pandemrix’s cross-reaction with a totally unintended natural antibody. Pandemrix may contain a protein that is too similar to a natural brain protein. In some people, this similarity may stimulate the release of an antibody. The study argues that this antibody may be killing off certain cells in the brain’s hypothalamus that are associated with the sleep-wake cycle. ...

Narcolepsy induced in this way is a permanent malady, since the cells that produce the much-needed sleep regulation protein are now simply gone, and do not regrow.

Other vaccines have been pulled from the market because of safety problems. Do not let anyone convince you that all vaccines are safe.