Now that millions of people are getting one of the available Covid-19 vaccines daily, a lot of questions and concerns are popping up, like possible side effects, bad reactions, and the like. While Side effects get all the attention, if you look at the data from vaccine clinical trials and the real world, you will see that many people do not experience any side effects beyond a sore arm. In the Pfizer vaccine trials, about 1 out of 4 patients reported no side effects at all. In the Moderna trials, 57% of patients (64 or younger) reported side effects after the first dose — that jumped to 82% after the second dose, which means almost 1 in 5 patients reported no reaction after the second shot.
A lack of side effects does not mean the vaccine is not working, states Dr. Paul Offit, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory panel. Offit notes that during the vaccine trials, a significant number of people did not report side effects, and yet the trials showed that about 95% of people were protected. “That proves you don’t have to have side effects in order to be protected,” he says.
Nobody really knows why some people have a lot of side effects and others have none. We do know that younger people mount stronger immune responses to vaccines than older people, whose immune systems get weaker with age. Women typically have stronger immune responses than men. But again, these differences do not mean that you are not protected if you do not feel much after getting the shot.
Scientists still are not sure how effective the vaccines are in people whose immune systems may be weakened from certain medical conditions, such as cancer treatments or HIV infection or because they are taking immune-suppressing drugs. But most experts believe the vaccines still offer these patients some protection against COVID-19.
The bottom line is that even though individual immune responses can vary, the data collected so far show that all three vaccines approved in the United States — Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson — are effective against severe illness and death from COVID-19.
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