COVID-19 vaccination is not associated with a higher risk of Bell’s palsy, encephalomyelitis or Guillain-Barre syndrome, UK researchers have found. 

But past SARS-CoV-2 infection does increase the likelihood of these rare, immune-mediated neurological events, they say. 

With several case reports of people developing the three conditions following vaccination, the University of Oxford-led researchers investigated whether COVID-19 vaccines increased the risk above rates found in the general population. 

They used primary care records from the UK and Spain to compare the incidence rate ratio among 8.2 million patients within 21 days of receiving their first dose of the Pfizer, Moderna or AstraZeneca vaccine with those for some 736,000 people with prior SARS-CoV-2 infection.