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NEW YORK (BLOOMBERG) – Covid-19 vaccine side effects ranging from fever and chills to headaches and joint pain could prevent some doctors and nurses from working amid a surge in hospitalizations across the country .
Health systems are preparing to vaccinate key hospital staff with coronavirus vaccines from Pfizer Inc and Moderna Inc, which could begin shipping to the United States in a matter of weeks, pending emergency use authorizations. .
Earlier this week, federal advisers recommended that US healthcare workers get vaccinated first, along with residents of long-term care facilities.
For hospitals, that could pose major scheduling problems at a time when many are filling up. More than 100,000 Americans were hospitalized with the virus on Wednesday (December 2), according to data from the Covid Tracking Project.
Providers will need to take medical staff from the bed to the vaccination clinic to receive their vaccinations. And if side effects occur, they could lose key workers for a couple of days.
To overcome this, some hospitals plan to stagger staff to keep units covered. Others are exploring the possibility of injecting workers at the end of their shifts, before they have a few days off.
Still, it’s hard to know what to expect without seeing complete data from the large, late-stage clinical trials from Pfizer and Moderna, said Dr. Paul Biddinger, vice president of emergency preparedness at Massachusetts General Hospital.
“It’s a bit easier to create a model of how we should stagger employee vaccinations when we know how often (side effects) occur and how severe,” said Dr. Biddinger. Plans could change when more robust data becomes available, he added.
Although drug companies have yet to release the full results of their largest trials, previous test disclosures in recent press releases give some insight into their safety profiles.
Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech SE said on November 18 that no serious safety issues were noted in the last stage of their trial. Among the participants who received the two-dose vaccine regimen, 3.8 percent experienced fatigue and 2 percent had headaches. Older adults reported fewer and milder adverse events. In a previous trial, companies identified cases of mild to moderate fever.
Moderna, meanwhile, said on Nov. 16 that it had also failed to identify serious security problems in the last stage of the trial. Mild to moderate side effects included fatigue (9.7 percent), muscle or joint pain (5.2 percent), headache (4.5 percent), and injection site pain (2, 7 percent). Side effects were more common after the second dose of the two-dose vaccine.
“We are very reassured that we have not seen cases of things that we would not expect,” said Dr. Buddy Creech, director of Vanderbilt’s Vaccine Research Program, which leads the trials of Covid-19 vaccines. “We see profiles of side effects that are common to other vaccines we use.”
Small proportion
Only a small proportion of those receiving coronavirus vaccines will face side effects, according to Dr. Creech, who is also serving as principal investigator for Moderna and Johnson & Johnson’s phase 3 clinical trials.
Remember, “it’s not 100 percent of people who have a fever and chills,” Dr. Creech said Thursday during a news panel organized by the American Society for Infectious Diseases, of which he is a member.
However, before the vaccination campaign begins, the possibility of side effects strong enough to put healthcare workers out of commission should be considered, said Dr. Creech.
If the possibility is not communicated effectively, he added, hospitals could run out of staff. At the same time, medical workers should also be taught to distinguish between the side effects of the vaccine and the symptoms of Covid-19, given that they are highly exposed to the virus.
“We will have to be somewhat strategic about who is offered the vaccine, so we are working with clinical leaders in those areas to make sure they scale their healthcare staff,” said Dr. Jeanmarie Mayer, chief of prevention. of Infections from the University of Utah. Salud, he said Thursday at a press conference.
Utah-based Intermountain Healthcare is a system that can vaccinate workers at the end of their shifts before they have a few days off, said Dr. Kristin Dascomb, medical director of infection prevention and employee health.
“When you have your weekend off, you may have the opportunity to have symptoms, however mild, so that you are not taking time off from work when we are stressing out caregivers right now,” said Dr. Dascomb he said at the press conference.
Hospitals generally plan to prioritize staff who work directly with coronavirus patients, as they are at the highest risk of contracting the disease on the job.
Mass General’s Dr. Biddinger fears that healthcare workers facing unexpected symptoms may panic and think that vaccines are flawed, sowing even more mistrust among an already skeptical public.
“We’re trying to be very honest about what people should expect when they get the vaccine, but remind them that it is a good thing and that it actually means that vaccination helps us to be more immune,” he said.
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