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Since Monday, eagerly The long-awaited Covid-19 vaccines have been reaching the arms of healthcare workers in the United States, the first slim stretch of millions of doses to come. But the joy that has received the arrival of the shots is already being silenced by worries. Billions of dollars were spent to come up with the formulas. Preparing the American population to receive them received much less attention.
This can be a mistake. Documentation provided by Pfizer and Moderna to the Food and Drug Administration notes that both vaccines have side effects (minor ones that disappear after about two days, but occurred in substantial percentages of people who received them in trials) and some serious reactions. Has been reported. Descriptions of those side effects are beginning to circulate, through news reports and also on social media. accounts written by the trial participants.
Those descriptions are reaching the public in the absence of any effort to contextualize or counter them. Until now, there has been no coordinated national campaign to assure people that the vaccine not only works, but is safe to take and will not cause illness in the long term. Health planners and researchers worry that it is too late to start.
“It’s really important, at this juncture when vaccines are about to be distributed, to talk to people about the predictable side effects of the vaccine,” says Eric Toner, senior physician and academic at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Safety. . “The worst case scenario would be that we don’t tell people this, and they have a reaction and think they got Covid from the shot or something is wrong.
That is a pressing concern for two reasons. First, fear of side effects turns out to be one of the main reasons people doubt these vaccines. And secondly, distrust opens the door not only to confusion but also to armed misinformation, and that will prevent people from taking the vaccine they need.
The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation’s KFF Covid-19 Vaccine Monitor, an ongoing survey of 1,600 people over the age of 18 that was released this week to provide an ongoing measure of public sentiment, reveals that, in general, people are they feel more positive about the vaccine than they were earlier this year. In November, 71 percent of participants said they are likely to get vaccinated, up from 63 percent in a survey conducted in September. But the remaining 27 percent said they would probably or definitely never take it, a proportion that rose to 33 percent among black adults, 33 percent among essential workers, and 29 percent among those who work in care. Of the health. For those who doubt, the main concern was fear of side effects.
This is a difficult thing to reassure, because the side effects are real. Although the Pfizer vaccine only received emergency clearance last weekend, and Moderna’s is not yet licensed, tens of thousands of people received it earlier this year in clinical trials. In news accounts and on social media, participants have described experiencing “a severe hangover”, “fever … fatigue and chills”, “symptoms similar to those of Covid”. One participant told CNBC that he was shaking so hard with chills that he broke a tooth.
Those accounts are consistent with data submitted by the companies to the FDA’s Advisory Committee on Vaccines and Related Biologics, which reviews safety and efficacy. According to the information documents, the Pfizer formula caused fatigue in 59.4 percent of trial participants after their second dose, headaches in 51.7 percent, muscle pain in 37.3 percent, joint pain in 21.9 percent, chills in 35.1 percent, and headaches in 15.8 percent. The numbers for the Moderna formula, released Tuesday, are similar: fatigue in 68.5 percent of recipients, headache in 63 percent, aches and pains in 59.6 percent, chills in 43.4 percent and fever in 15.6 percent.
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