[ad_1]
The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are based on genetic technology that has never before produced a vaccine that has gained regulatory approval. They are authorized for emergency use only. Studies on its safety, including the cases of an Alaskan health worker and a Boston doctor who experienced severe allergic reactions after receiving their vaccinations, are still ongoing.
And when Dr. Wilson went to bed at 10:30 am on a weekday, she couldn’t help but be “hyper-aware,” she said, “that she had just been vaccinated with this new vaccine.”
Navigating a mental fog
As vaccines advance, experts have agreed that the two now being distributed elicit more reactions than most.
At the Sundale Nursing Home in Morgantown, West Virginia, 81-year-old Betty Shannon said some residents had an upset stomach after becoming some of the first seniors in the country to receive a Covid vaccine.
Lorenzo Alfonso, 34, a nursing assistant in California, was unusually tired and in pain.
Delayna Frint, a nurse from Highlands Ranch, Colorado, said her arm hurt so much after the injection that to hang IV therapy bags, she had to go down the steps.
But for infectious disease experts, a nation with post-vaccine malaise would be the best news in a long time. Side effects wear off within a few days and are a sign, experts say, that the vaccine is working.
“We call them ‘side effects,’ but it’s really just an effect,” said Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccinologist at the University of Pennsylvania who is a member of the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory panel. “This is what your immune response does when it responds to an infection.”
Each of the vaccines works by prompting the body to produce a particular protein that the coronavirus uses to enter human cells; neither exposes the recipient to the virus itself. The presence of that protein in the body triggers the production of new antibodies that can destroy the protein, the key to providing protection against a future invasion of the real virus. But the process also releases substances that can cause inflammation, which can result in fever, fatigue, headache, and other symptoms.
