Population-Based Incidence of Guillain-Barré Syndrome During Mass Immunization With Viral Vaccines: A Pooled Analysis

Abstract

Misunderstanding temporal coincidence of adverse events during mass vaccination and invalid assessment of possible safety concerns have negative effects on immunization programs, leading to low immunization coverage. We conducted this systematic review and meta-analysis to identify the incidence rates of GBS that are temporally associated with viral vaccine administration but might not be attributable to the vaccines. By literature search in Embase and PubMed, we included 48 publications and 2,110,441,600 participants. The pooled incidence rate of GBS was 3.09 per million persons (95% confidence interval [CI]: 2.67 to 3.51) within six weeks of vaccination, equally 2.47 per 100,000 person-year (95%CI: 2.14 to 2.81). Subgroup analyses illustrated that the pooled rates were 2.77 per million persons (95%CI: 2.47 to 3.07) for individuals who received the influenza vaccine and 2.44 per million persons (95%CI: 0.97 to 3.91) for human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines, respectively. Our findings evidence the GBS-associated safety of virus vaccines. We present a reference for the evaluation of post-vaccination GBS rates in mass immunization campaigns, including the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine.