Posted on 03/23/2021 9:33:51 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
If you’re gearing up to get your COVID-19 vaccine, maybe keep your schedule light for the day after your second shot — or only shot, if you’re getting the Johnson and Johnson variety.
Some people feel muscle aches, pains or just flat-out exhaustion afterward, side effects that other vaccines prompt in people, too. “These are not unexpected,” says Carlos Malvestutto, an infectious disease physician at Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. “We see them to a higher or lesser extent with pretty much every vaccine.” And while who feels what symptoms and when might surprise some people, the way the side effects are playing out now that millions are getting vaccinated lines up with what a lot of medical professionals expected to see.
How You Know the COVID-19 Vaccine Is Working
First things first: “That reaction is not having COVID-19,” Malvestutto says. The vaccines can’t bring you down with the infection — they only supply snippets of the coronavirus itself, and you’d need the entire virus to make you sick. Instead, any aches, arm tenderness or fatigue you might feel a day or two after the shot comes from your immune system doing what it’s supposed to: Learn how to fight off a real infection.
In the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, for example, the shot introduces into your cells pieces of mRNA, the instructions for your body to make a protein from the surface of a coronavirus. Once your cells start churning out the virus protein, your immune system recognizes the particles as something that doesn’t belong to you. Flagging the proteins down as undesirable kicks off a campaign to eliminate them, which can come with all the symptoms of an activated immune system — aches, sore muscles, and feeling rundown.
Why You Got Bad Side Effects and Grandma Didn't
Not everyone might feel the same side effects, or any at all. Malvestutto said that he, for example, felt some chills after getting his vaccine, while his wife, another physician, felt under-the-weather for longer. In some cases, older individuals have fewer side effects after the vaccine. This may sound counterintuitive — these same people are more likely to get seriously ill or die from the virus — but the lack of aches and pains proves why seniors were a priority for a vaccine, Malvestutto says. Feeling as if nothing happened after the injections could mean your immune system isn’t quite as easy to activate. You might not respond to the real virus with as much vigor, a situation that is more likely to be true for immune systems that have been working hard for, say, 70 years. That being said, someone doesn’t have to feel like they have the flu after the shot in order to develop good resistance to the actual virus.
People receiving the two-shot vaccine might also notice that they only feel run down after the second one — another expected pattern, Malvestutto says. If the first injection tees the immune system up, the second shot is the follow-through swing that sends the ball flying, as the follow-up dose is when the body gets exposed to much more of the protein it now knows to attack. “The second shot comes into a primed body that recognizes [the protein] and goes to work,” Malvestutto says. The two-part act also explains why people who are exposed to the virus between injections — or within a couple weeks of the second dose — might get sick. It takes time for your immune system to build up enough defense tools after the second shot.
If someone feels the weight of the symptoms after the first dose, that could be a sign they were already infected with the virus, Malvestutto says. Studies have found that people who were previously sick with the coronavirus developed side effects and larger immune responses one dose in, meaning their immune system was already in the “teed up” phase. “They already have some antibodies, so half the work is already done,” Malvestutto says. The force of a single dose for those who already had COVID-19 has persuaded a few nations to consider dropping the second shot for previous patients.
The potential day or two spent wanting to stay in bed after the vaccine could be a small price to pay compared to coming down with the virus itself, Malvestutto says. Sure, a large percentage of people infected with the coronavirus never get symptoms. But some patients who had to get hospitalized for the virus — for a long time, that number hovered around 3.5 percent of all cases — as well as those who had more mild infections, are still reporting shortness of breath, chest tightness and other symptoms months after first falling ill. Estimates suggest up to one in 10 people who get sick with COVID-19 become “long-haulers,” or people dealing with symptoms for weeks to months.
And if you still have questions about what the vaccines do inside your body, that's okay. "Everyone has a right to get these vaccines," Malvestutto says. "Don't be afraid to voice concerns, and don’t keep concerns to yourself and quietly decide the vaccine isn't for you."
Calm down! I was addressing a larger issue, which many here at FR consider serious.
Regards,
I’ve now learned of two more large scale rash reactions, delayed 7-10 days, but lasting several days in those cases. These seem to lean a little more toward shingles-like symptoms. Both are one person removed from me, that is, I know a person who knows the person affected. One is a person who received the Pfizer vaccine, the other, Moderna. In both cases, the person’s PCP appears to be aware of this type delayed reaction that is not a site location reaction. I’ve not searched more for a couple days, so as of 3/22 I’d not seen anything online about it.
I should clarify: “...delayed 7-10 days after a 2nd shot”...
After my second Pfizer jab I had one day of muscle aches then one day of tiredness then fine by third day
Yep. It’s a site that exploits the fact that most people have no reason to know how DNA and RNA work.
That strong reaction to the 2nd shot is actually a good sign.
It’s indicating that the first shot trained your immune system to recognize the virus. Your antibodies identified the 2nd vaccine and attacked it. Now they will be ready if you ever contract the virus itself.
One, it is direct genetic manipulation of the immune system. My concern with that is primarily with quality control during the large-scale manufacture of the mRNA. Initial doses made "by hand" in the lab for the trials are one thing. Producing industrial quantities is another. Yes I realize that is what pharmaceutical company's business is and they're good at it but... Scaling up almost always involves a few lessons of it's own. If there are issues with manufacturing can "the message" get garbled and change? Your information does ease some concerns I have. Perhaps at worst a garbled message just produces ineffective antigens.
Two, it is brand new, never been tried on this scale before technology. The first two covid-19 mRNA based vaccines are in fact the first mRNA based vaccines to ever be approved by the FDA. Even that approval is on a emergency/experimental basis.
Given our track record as a species with developing new technologies or even simply trying new things in any field it is a safe bet that there is something wrong with those mRNA based vaccines. Yes it is possible we "got it right" on the first try, but history and statistics are on my side - there is something wrong with them. We just don't know what it is yet.
If we're lucky, extremely lucky, in five or ten years covid-19 will only be something we bore our kids and grandkids with as we tell stories of "the lost year."
If we're nominally lucky, in five or ten years we'll have figured out that mRNA vaccines work fairly well but need some tweaking and oh by the way we'll need booster shots every five or ten years.
If Murphy raises his head, in five or ten years the news will be about how the new growth industry is building and staffing long-term care facilities for the double-digit millions of people with debilitating immunological side effects that are only just now coming to light. The top news story will be the newly signed "Mayo Clinic Accords" that severely regulate and restrict mRNA based vaccines and other uses of the technology.
I believe it is likely we are simply headed for the middle-ground case where we learn a few things, tweak a few things, and move on. In these kinds of things though I am very risk-averse so I am going to opt into the control group and not get the vaccine.
Mine is trying to crybully me into getting it as well. We had it and recovered, but she's insisting that our kid won't let us visit our youngest grandson unless we have it.
You’re wrong.
Quote: A new study by researchers from Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research-Cambridge, Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering-Harvard University, Department of Biology-Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences-Harvard University have alarmingly discovered that the SARS-CoV-2 RNA is reverse-transcribed and integrated into the human genome.
I think your rectocranial inversion is inoperable.
“I think your rectocranial inversion is inoperable.”
If so I’d be your twin, but I’m not.
“mRNA (in the case of the RNA-based vaccine) will remain in the cytoplasm and will not enter into the nucleus, where the host DNA resides. And importantly, humans do not have the required reverse transcriptase (that is usually encoded by retroviral viruses) to actually reverse transcribe the RNA into DNA for its genomic incorporation.”
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