Vaccinations and multiple sclerosis

Sunday 10 October 2004 by Marc Girard

As exemplified by an accompanying editorial1, results of two studies2,3 published in a recent issue of NEJM have been overwhelmingly interpreted as demonstrating that no link exists between hepatitis B (HB) vaccine and multiple sclerosis (MS). In France, although the paper of Ascherio et al was the first, to my knowledge, to discuss the results of previous case-control studies as suggesting “nonsignificant increases in risk” (the predominating thesis here being rather that lack of statistical significance demonstrated a lack of risk), it has become almost impossible to publish any fair discussion on these investigations.