teens should be lying or sitting on the floor after their vaccination
The National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products (ANSM) has updated its monitoring instructions relating to adolescents vaccinated against human papillomavirus. According to these new recommendations for health professionals, adolescents must remain lying or sitting on the ground for fifteen minutes following the injection.
These new instructions follow the fatal fall, two weeks ago, of a young man who made a discomfort after being vaccinated at his college. As one of the main side effects of the vaccine is the risk of “feeling unwell”, “it is important that simple measures are put in place to avoid any injury: vaccinated people must remain lying down (on floor mats or blankets) ) or sitting on the ground leaning against a wall in a clear space,” explains the agency.
Until now, according to the instructions for vaccination in college, organized since October, only monitoring of students within a quarter of an hour following the injection was recommended, without specifying in what context. A note from the ARS (Regional Health Agency) Île-de-France published in June explained that students had to be seated on “chairs” or “armchairs”, and recommended lying down students who were feeling unwell.
Investigation opened in Loire-Atlantique
This change of instructions comes after the death of a 5th grade student from Saint-Dominique college in Saint-Herblain near Nantes (Loire-Atlantique) at the end of October, following a heavy fall. The Nantes public prosecutor’s office, which opened an investigation into manslaughter, specified that “the schoolboy, who did not feel well shortly after the injection, had been seated on a chair and fell backwards on his head after a faintness “.
The ANSM specifies that post-vaccination discomfort, sometimes brief losses of consciousness, are “uncommon and quickly resolved, may correspond to a psychogenic reaction to the injection” and “may be accompanied by tremors or stiffness”.
