The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines have genetic technology that has never before produced a vaccine that has obtained regulatory approval. They are authorized for emergency use only. Studies on its safety, including the cases of an Alaskan healthcare professional and a Boston doctor who experienced severe allergic reactions after receiving their vaccines, are still ongoing.
And when Dr. Wilson crawled into bed at 10:30 am on a weekday morning, she couldn’t help being “hyperconscious”, she said, “that I had just been vaccinated with this new vaccine”
Navigating in a brain fog
With regard to vaccines, experts agree that the two distributed now cause more reactions than most.
At the Sundale nursing home in Morgantown, W.Va., Betty Shannon, 81, said some residents had a stomachache after becoming some of the first elderly people in the country to receive a vaccine against Covid.
Lorenzo Alfonso, 34, a nursing assistant in California, was exceptionally tired and in pain.
Delayna Frint, a nurse in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, said her arm was so sore after the injection that, in order to hang bags of intravenous therapy, she had to lower the stands.
But for infectious disease specialists, a nation on the brink of post-vaccine malaise would be the best news in a long time. The side effects dissipate in a few days and are a sign, experts say, that the vaccine is working.
“We call them ‘side effects’, but it’s actually just an effect,” said Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccinologist at the University of Pennsylvania who is a member of the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory panel. “This is what your immune response does when it is responding to an infection.”
Each vaccine works by stimulating the body to produce a specific protein that the coronavirus uses to enter human cells; neither exposes the recipient to the virus itself. The presence of this protein in the body triggers the production of new antibodies that can destroy the protein – the key to providing protection against future invasion of the real virus. But the process also releases substances that can cause inflammation, which can result in fever, fatigue, headache and other symptoms.