February 7, 2023 – Images of uncontrollable shaking, trembling, and involuntary convulsions. It's a visibly disturbing condition that has been going viral on social media recently.
End of last month Video resurfaced from 2021 by Angelia Desselle, a then 45-year-old woman from Louisiana trying to leave while she allegedly had these symptoms, which she said were attributable to a COVID-19 vaccination. This is only one example of many.
Since being reposted on Twitter, Desselle's video has been viewed greater than 72 million times and helped reignite the controversy over the security of COVID vaccinations. Her original video – first posted on Facebook – was flagged by the location as a part of an effort to Combating misinformationbased on Politifact. One of the last retweets had this Context added: “the video … was debunked by multiple news outlets and local and state health officials and found no connection between Desselle's alleged two-day symptoms and the COVID vaccination.”
Nevertheless, such videos persist. Vaccine sceptics see them as confirmation of their belief that the vaccines are dangerous, despite mountains of evidence on the contrary and international assurances of safety.
While these aren't obvious attempts to mislead, experts have a proof for the tremors: In many cases, these atypical body movements are as a result of a typical, disabling condition called functional neurological disorder, or FND, says neurologist Dr. Alfonso Fasano, chair of neuromodulation and multidisciplinary care on the University of Toronto and a clinical researcher on the Krembil Brain Institute, a part of the University Health Network.
It is assumed that FNDs with reference to altered activity of brain networks (i.e. disruption of the brain’s normal mechanisms for controlling the body) and possibly “triggered by a combination of abnormal physical and psychological experiences”, accordingly the Society for Functional Neurological Disorders.
“This is so common that it is hardly understood,” says Fasano, co-author of a study Study of patients who consulted a physician with neurological symptoms after COVID-19 infection or vaccination.
He says that lots of the patients he has seen within the clinic (including 43% of the study participants) suffer from a dysfunction that sometimes simmers just beneath the surface, waiting to be triggered by something.
“There's really something wrong with them, and something wrong with their brain; their brain works differently,” Fasano says.
While aspects akin to psychological stress, underlying medical conditions (or infections akin to COVID-19 and the flu), and past trauma predispose some patients to FND, others develop the syndrome with none explicable cause.
An ideal storm
Functional nerve disorders are usually not a latest phenomenon; they’ve been described in a single form or one other because the Middle Ages. Today, an estimated 4% to 12% of the population are affected and it’s regularly diagnosed in neurological clinics.
What makes it different this time is the “perfect storm” – ongoing stress and exhaustion from the pandemic, the megaphone of social media and its ability to achieve thousands and thousands of individuals concurrently in real time, and global vaccination campaigns – all of which result in the event of symptoms of nervous disorders being more regularly attributed to vaccinations.
“Vaccines have been associated with neuromuscular problems following administration, but this is a very rare side effect,” says Matthew Laurens, MD, MPH, a pediatric infectious disease specialist and professor of pediatrics on the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore.
“Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare condition in which the body's immune system damages nerves, has been reported in association with the 1976 swine flu vaccination campaign,” he says. “However, sometimes events occur that happen to people immediately after vaccination and have nothing to do with the vaccination at all.”
Neurological events like Guillain-Barré or involuntary muscle twitching (referred to as myoclonus) were reported more regularly after the infection itself. A study Published in The Annals of Neurology last yr showed that simply being infected with COVID-19 significantly increases an individual’s risk of neurological events.
“The result was that the likelihood of a neurological event after COVID infection was about 600 times higher than after vaccination. For the general population, this means that the COVID vaccines are unlikely to be associated with a movement disorder,” says Dr. Jennifer Frontera, co-author of the study and a neurologist at New York University's Langone Health.
Even infection with the virus may only reveal what was already hidden beneath the surface. “There isn't much evidence so far that COVID itself causes movement disorder,” says Frontera. “I suspect that in some cases it might unmask movement disorder.”
Fasano agrees. “Like any medical procedure or minor trauma, anything can trigger dysfunction in people who are predisposed to it.”