Two and a half hours after being injected with the Covid-19 vaccine, Dr. Taneisha Wilson was stricken with the worst headache of her life.
At her home office in Cranston, Rhode Island, Wilson, 38, an emergency physician with a foundation she calls “horse-like,” put her head down on the desk. Fighting a wave of nausea, she let out a neutral groan loud enough to be heard by her husband in a room down the hall.
“Are you okay, baby?” he shouted.
“It felt like I was beaten,” Wilson said in an interview.
That is not how most people who receive the vaccine feel after that, but reactions like Wilson were not uncommon in the clinical trial results of the two COVID vaccines now on the spread across the country. Pfizer, the company that makes the one that got it, said some 13% of recipients aged 18 to 55 had a bad headache after the first dose. About 16% of those who received the other vaccine, made by Moderna, in a late-stage trial had a response strong enough to stop them from doing their daily work.
With tens of millions of Americans waiting for their chance to get a glimpse, many are hungry for details of what to expect. So, at the request of friends, colleagues and reporters, some people like Wilson who led the largest vaccination program in U.S. history are starting to offer their personal accounts.
The New York Times interviewed several dozen of the new vaccines in the days that followed. They described a wide range of responses, with no response at all – “I can’t even say I got the bullet,” said a hospital employee in Iowa City, Iowa – to symptoms such as uncontrolled movement and ” brain fog. A nurse’s assistant in Glendora, California, was wondering if the fever he was running was a side effect of the vaccine or a sign that he had been caught by one of his Covid-19 patients. .
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And there was a dizzying mix of sore arms. Some compared the pain to that from a picture of the flu; for others, it was much worse.
Like almost everyone who received the vaccine spoke to the Times for this article, Wilson stressed that she had no regrets about getting the picture, despite a headache, which went away within 36 hours. The Food and Drug Administration has found the vaccines to be safe and very effective. And public health leaders say a major vaccine is the only hope for controlling the virus that now claims the lives of nearly 3,000 Americans every day.
But in the first weeks of vaccination, there is an inevitable element in suspension.
Along with a card reminding them when to receive the required second dose, vaccine recipients will receive information on how to report side effects to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention through an app called V- Safe.
Both the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines rely on genetic technology that has never produced a vaccine that has gained regulatory approval. They are authorized for emergency use only. Investigations into the safety, including the cases of an Alaskan healthcare worker and a doctor in Boston who suffered a severe allergic reaction after receiving their pictures, are still ongoing.
And when Wilson went to bed at 10:30 on a weekday morning, she couldn’t help but be “over-aware,” she said, “that I had just been vaccinated with the this novel vaccine. “
Sailing brain fog
As vaccines go, experts have agreed, the two that have now been released are getting more reactions than most.
At Sundale Nursing Home in Morgantown, West Virginia, Betty Shannon, 81, said some cohabitants had an upset stomach after being on some of the first seniors in the country to receive the Covid vaccine. -19.
Lorenzo Alfonso, 34, a nursing assistant in California, was incredibly tired and achy.
Delayna Frint, a nurse in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, said her arm was so sore after the burn that she had to hang the lower bags to hang intravenous medicine bags.
But for infectious disease experts, a nation down for the count with malaise after vaccination would be the best news in the near future. The side effects spread within a few days, and are a sign, experts say, that the vaccine works.
“We call them side effects, but this is just an effect,” said Dr. Paul Offit, a University of Pennsylvania vaccineist who is a member of the FDA’s vaccine advisory panel. “This is what your immune response does when dealing with an infection.”
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The vaccines work by stimulating the body to make certain proteins that the coronavirus uses to enter human cells; neither does the person who gets the virus himself. The presence of that protein in the body eliminates the production of new antibodies that can destroy the protein – the key to providing protection against future attack of the virus. But the process also releases substances that can cause inflammation, which can cause fever, fatigue, headaches and other symptoms.
Many more participants in the vaccine trials reported discomfort after the second dose, given three or four weeks later, than after the first. Maybe that’s because by then, the body is already primed to attack the protein, experts said.
The majority of reactions received by the 1.9 million Americans vaccinated this month have already been seen among approximately 35,000 people who received the vaccine in Pfizer and Moderna clinical trials. But experts expect new ones to emerge: “If it’s a million, you have to have a million to see even one,” said Dr. Peter Doshi, an associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
Some may be mild allergic reactions, such as the “itching all over the body” and “small, light arm pains” explained by Dr. Megan Hajjar of Farmington, Connecticut, in a Facebook post with a cookie video. Or they could be more severe, such as the small number of cases of anaphylaxis that the CDC has already identified.
And others may just be more rigorous versions of the tests known as “fat.” Alyson MacGregor, associate professor of emergency medicine at Brown University and an accomplished home cook, said she spent the day after her vaccination in a mental fog that turned her effort into the most basic diet. to become an inaccessible blob.
“I can’t believe I got rid of ramen,” she told her husband that night.
She felt, she said, as if “there was a cloud above me, following me around. ”
Publication of debate
The first several million doses of both vaccines are indicated for health care workers and for nursing home residents who are at higher risk of dying from COVID-19 if they become infected.
Public health leaders have estimated that more than 200 million Americans need to be vaccinated to prevent the virus from spreading. In opinion polls, there has been a significant chunk of skepticism about getting Covid vaccines. And some frontline health workers have fought against whether talking about their own side effects could prevent others from getting the vaccine.
“I’m worried – is it going to inspire someone to have second thoughts? ”Said Dr. Matthew Harris, 38, an emergency medicine doctor in Great Neck, New York.
Harris was up all night with a fever, moving under a blanket, after getting his first sight. Joint pain in his wrists and shoulders lasted into the next day.
But he had already posted a post on Facebook about getting his picture taken. It was a particularly emotional time for him, nine months to the day after he was hospitalized with a severe case of Covid and did not know if he would live to see his wife and two young children again. .
“Try it,” said one non-medical friend on his vaccination career, “tell us what the experience is like !!!”
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So the next day, he posted about his response, with the hashtag #stillworthit.
“Everybody has read, ‘This is the light at the end of the tunnel,'” Harris said in an interview. “But are people going to feel great 100% of the time after this vaccine? And if we are not honest with them, how can we expect them to trust us? ”
Dr. Sylvia Owusu-Ansah, an emergency physician in Pittsburgh, has also chosen to post vaccine side effects on Facebook. She is an African American, and at the live vaccine earlier this month, she told reporters that she “wanted to share with my community that it is right to enough. “Confidence in the vaccine is particularly high among Black Americans, due to a history of ill-treatment of black people by the medical center.
In the name of publicity, Owusu-Ansah recorded “mild muscle aches and pain with left arm pain” on the first day and “nasal congestion, headache” on days three through five – specifically starting her careers with “I GET HERE! ”
Another dose
Forty-eight hours after Wilson’s post-vaccination headache was put to bed, she returned to work in the hospital emergency room. Like many hospitals across the country, his intensive care unit was full of Covid cases. On one recent move, Wilson said, there were 12 patients in the emergency care bay and only one bed available in the ICU for admission.
“These are people who get strokes, a myocardial infarction that requires catheterization,” she recalled. “You have to understand the truth.”
At the time, Wilson said, it wasn’t a vaccine side effect that made her feel like she was throwing up.
She is scheduled for a second dose of the vaccine next month.