Day 908: Prions Again

A French preprint came out in June documenting 26 out of over 50 sudden cases of Creutzfeld Jakob disease (CJD) after vaccination with COVID vaccines. The preprint has since been taken down, but you can get it from the Wayback Machine if you're interested.

The paper goes through the usual PLAAC analysis to detect a prion region in the older COVID spike protein used in the vaccines, and reassuringly documents that this region has disappeared from Omicron. It's perhaps more interesting for the 26 French case studies (out of over 50), along with another 16 cases from abroad. In a later edit they mention 19 CJD deaths recorded in VAERS through April, and link to a search that actually produces 33 CJD deaths out of VAERS when run on today's data. (If you're wondering whether health care workers have the time these days for differential diagnosis of CJD, there are more accurate, real-time tests now than the traditional "check the brain for holes on autopsy".)

Before you start worrying that you may already be a downer, the authors have more good news; the average time of onset in France was 11 days after vaccination, so you're probably in the clear as long as you avoid boosters. (Sadly there was no genetic analysis for the downer codon.)

CJD is a death sentence, and it took about five months for patients to die, though some died "sudden[ly]" after only 2.5 months. An addendum notes that they are all dead now; one unfortunate soul apparently lasted a year. The sudden onset and rapid death are enough to distinguish the cases from sporadic CJD (sCJD) or variant (mad cow) CJD (vCJD).

PlagueBlog pauses to suggest the abbreviation vxCJD.

Three of the French cases were associated with the AstraZeneca (non-mRNA) vaccine, though all the VAERS cases list mRNA vaccines. (This is not a result of high uptake of AstraZeneca, which is only about 5% of the doses given in France to date.) While COVID itself may have caused some rise in CJD cases pre-Omicron, PlagueBlog has found that case reports claiming so usually fail to note whether the patient had a spike-based vaccine about 11 days before onset of CJD symptoms, regardless of their COVID histories.

Note that this rash of vxCJD would not be the first vaccine disaster involving transmissible spongiform encephalopathies. A sheep vaccine caused a scrapie outbreak known as the 1935 Moredun Louping-ill Vaccine Disaster. Another contaminated vaccine caused a smaller scrapie outbreak in Italy in the 1990's.