Getting a COVID-19 vaccine comes with a lot of benefits. There’s the protection against a world-altering virus, the ability to travel more safely, and hanging out in people’s houses again.
However, there is also a chance that the vaccine will be accompanied by some unwelcome side effects like a sore arm or fatigue.
Health experts say the reason why more people are having reactions to COVID-19 vaccines compared to flu vaccines is because they’re made differently. According to the experts, the side-effects felt from a COVID-19 vaccine is just the immune system reacting to it.
Dr. Albert Ko, a professor of epidemiology and medicine at the Yale School of Public Health in New Haven, Connecticut, said, “What we know from the (clinical) trials is that there’s not a correlation between not experiencing symptoms and not being able to mount an immune response.”
“People still mount good antibodies … whether they experienced symptoms or not after vaccination. People should not suspect that if they don’t get symptoms, the vaccine didn’t work,” the doctor added.
Dr. Anne Liu, an infectious disease physician at Stanford Health Care in Palo Alto, California, explained that “majority of people” in both Moderna and Pfizer clinical trials experienced “local side-effects” around the injection site.
Dr. David Dowdy, an epidemiologist and associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said, “It doesn’t mean that the people who have stronger side effects are the ones who are more protected.”
He further said: “Some people are going to feel that pain much more strongly than others, but it doesn’t mean that those who didn’t feel the pain didn’t get the effect of that blow. It’s much more about how people’s bodies are attuned to what their immune system is doing.”
Dr. Dowdy also added, “The people who don’t have those reactions are still very protected.”