Ah, the swine flu, again. I’ve engaged in discussions on this topic before, delving into the science, and this is scare mongering.
Let’s take your news story, for example. The ingredient squalene is cited as causing the narcolepsy, but squalene is naturally produced by your body and flows through your blood at this very moment; it’s added to vaccines to strengthen your immune response, because there’s not enough vaccine for everybody. Vaccines do contain formaldehyde and mercury, but for perfectly valid reasons such as a preservative. Your body tolerates certain thresholds of toxins in your blood without harm; there is more mercury in a tuna sandwich than any vaccine.
Vaccines are not without risk, of course. You have a 1 in a million chance of getting the sometimes deadly Guillain-Barré Syndrome from a flu vaccine, which sucks if you hit the unlucky lottery, but that is far better than the 1 in 80,000 chance every time you have the flu. In perspective, you have a 1 in 6,500 chance of dying in a car accident this year (or about 1 in 2,372,500 chance every day). So, the chances of getting Guillain-Barré Syndrome from the swine flu vaccine is relatively the same as dying from a car accident within the next two days.
Over 30 million people received the Pandemrix swine flu vaccine in 2009; 800 suspected cases of narcolepsy would place the risk at 1 in 375,000 (or about the same as dying from a car accident within the next six days).