The Best COVID Vaccine to Get If You’re Hesitant About Vaccinations, Doctors Say
ARE YOU UNDECIDED ABOUT GETTING VACCINATED AGAINST COVID? THIS MAY BE THE ANSWER.
Research has shown that the Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccine, which was the third one to be approved for use in the U.S., has caused fewer side effects than its counterparts, which both use mRNA technology. In comparing the results of the three vaccines’ clinical trials, a recent report from The Guardian showed the Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine is the least likely to cause the top four most common side effects: pain at the injection site, fatigue, headache, and muscle soreness.
“It’s better tolerated than the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine in terms of local, what we call reactogenicity,” Paul Goepfert , MD, the director of the Alabama Vaccine Research Clinic, told NBC News of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine. “[It] causes less people to have a sore arm, less people have what we call systemic side effects, including fatigue, fever, myalgias, [and] headache.”
Pfizer Caused This Reaction in Half of Recipients, New Study Says
Almost half of Pfizer recipients experienced fatigue after the second dose.
There’s been a lot of talk about vaccine side effects, and that makes sense: When you do get your COVID shot, you want to know what’s coming your way in the ensuing hours. To help break things down, one recent study looked at all of the most common side effects of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. The report found that there was one vaccine reaction that nearly half of the people who got the Pfizer shot had after the second dose. Read on to find out which side effect you have a 50-50 chance of experiencing with Pfizer, and for a look at the most common Moderna side effect, Moderna Caused This Reaction in 82 Percent of People, New Study Says.
Pain at the injection site was the most common side effect of Pfizer.
After I posted earlier today, this news made it to the Drudge front page as a standalone headline. Here is the article, from Israel, Drudge is featuring:
In their study, the prevalence of the South African strain among vaccinated individuals who were infected despite their inoculation was eight times higher than its prevalence in the unvaccinated infected population. Though the number of such infections among the vaccinated was relatively small, the findings indicated that this variant was far more successful in getting through vaccinated individuals’ defenses than other strains.
And later there is this little nugget:
The research, which has been posted online but not yet peer-reviewed, is likely to raise questions about Pfizer’s own real-world study, which found that in South Africa, despite the local strain being prevalent, the vaccine was 100 percent effective.
I was disappointed to see the reasons given for not getting a vaccine in this extensive survey. There are some reasonable concerns related to unlikely or unknown side effects, but 60%+ of certain groups were afraid they’d get covid from it?
Yes, I think it’s pretty well established that the common PFE vaccine side effects are not quite as bad as the MRNA ones, and especially compared to the 2nd MRNA shot. That said, if the side effects, should they occur, are limited to feeling vaguely crappy for a day or two and nothing worse, that’s nothing I’m going to worry about.
Of those who received one dose of the messenger RNA vaccine, 74 percent of Moderna recipients reported injection site reactions of pain, swelling, redness, and itching, as opposed to 65.4 percent of the Pfizer/BioNTech recipients.
Furthermore, 52 percent of those who received the Moderna vaccine said they had a generalized reaction like fatigue, headache, and body pain, compared to 48 percent of recipients who had the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.
Both local and systemic reactions occurred more frequently after the second dose for both vaccines: Moderna recipients reported 82 percent and 74 percent, while Pfizer/BioNTech recipients reported 69 percent and 64.2 percent, respectively.
A plea for clearer terminology from an occasional poster. Both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are based on messenger RNA technology MRNA. But confusingly this is also the ticker symbol of Moderna pharmaceutical company. I could noodle out the meaning of xerty’s post but it took me a while. PFE is clearly Pfizer but we need a better acronym for the Moderna vaccine.
Especially considering that an important feature for me is that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine does not use messenger rna technology.
I use ticker symbols PFE, MRNA, AZN, JNJ, etc to refer to the companies and/or their vaccines. For the technology using messenger RNA, I use the biology notation mRNA (along with tRNA and rRNA etc, although those don’t come up for the vaccines)
AZN vaccine not being recommended for younger adults (<30) due to the blood clot risks not outweighing the risks of covid. around 1 in 200k have a serious blood clot on the first dose, and about 1/4 of those are fatal.
FDA calls for ceasing JNJ vaccine while investigating health risks. Feds are stopping it, states encouraged to stop likewise.
Federal health agencies on Tuesday called for an immediate pause in use of Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose coronavirus vaccine after six recipients in the United States developed a rare disorder involving blood clots within about two weeks of vaccination, officials briefed on the decision said.
All six recipients were women between the ages of 18 and 48. One woman died and a second woman in Nebraska has been hospitalized in critical condition, the officials said.
Even though it has turned into a discussion of vaccines and vaccinations generally, which is fine, this thread began life as a poll thread. I just went and looked at the poll results in the OP, first I had looked in a while. It’s interesting:
First of all, the poll remains open and people remain able to change their votes. We have a good many votes. I dunno whether it is new voters or people changing their old votes, but it seems to me there is a polling shift in the direction of vaccine hesitancy.
I don’t want to make a huge deal out of our little poll here, but vaccine hesitancy is probably not a good thing for America at this point in the proceedings. Sure there is a very small risk with these vaccines. But by far the larger risk is the virus itself, and in particular the variants which can materialize if people do not get the vaccine, thereby allowing the virus to continue rampaging.