Autoimmune Hepatitis-Like Syndrome Following COVID-19 Vaccination: Real or Imagined?

Excerpt

When a new vaccine is administered over a short time period to millions of individuals, any adverse event that follows can be presumed to be an effect of the vaccine [1]. It is difficult, however, to establish with certainty a causal relationship between vaccination and adverse events, with few possible exceptions such as anaphylaxis and vaccine-strain infections after live viral vaccination. For decades, a variety of vaccines have been implicated in eliciting an autoimmune response, some with credible evidence supporting causality (e.g., diphtheria toxin and Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS), MMR vaccination and thrombocytopenic purpura) [2], and others in which extensive review has failed to demonstrate a causal link (e.g., hepatitis B vaccine and multiple sclerosis) [3]. …