RE: I got the J&J 3 days ago.
So folks, any side effects so far?
Hope you’re doing fine after the vaccine...
See my post 7. Obviously early days, but so far nothing concerning.
Worth noting again, for those that do not know - Pfizer and Moderna are mRNA vaccines and while I think that technology has promise, working in IT has taught me to never be an early adopter of a new tech if you don’t want ugly surprises. Johnson and Johnson’s vaccine is based on 30-plus year old technology and there’s not really much new in it; it also has nothing to do with mRNA.
Wife got the J&J appx 2 weeks ago. She felt rotten for about 1.5 days and still has a little discomfort in the injected arm. In the process she learned that women are to refrain from mammograms for several weeks following any of these vaccines, as they can enlarge lymph nodes and show false positives on a mammogram.
Just following up - late that night, I started feeling anticipated side effects. Bit of a headache, general low intensity body aches, some fatigue, slight fever. Pretty much SOP when viruses invade and the immune system identifies that there’s an intruder.
This is actually *good* news, though - this means that my immune system hasn’t previously been exposed to human adenovirus 5, the pithed carrier virus for for the COVID-19 proteins, and it’s going to war against the new threat it’s spotted. All the above symptoms are caused not by the virus but by the immune system in my case - some people do not have this happen and their system still works just fine, others have worse responses and it even varies by vaccine. A reaction on this scale (for me) tends to indicate that the immune system won’t forget what the threat ‘looks like’ any time soon. In this case (to use an oversimplification,) this AD5 virus dose has been the equivalent of painted and mocked up to look like COVID-19 to the immune system; once my immune system takes them apart, it will know that if it “sees” something that looks like it, it can kill it immediately with a pre-prepared response instead of going to war and trying to figure out what it is and how to attack it.
Or put another way, basically the Johnson & Johnson vaccine trains the immune system with inert practice targets.