The mRNA vaccines developed against COVID-19 are certain to be a real medical revolution, and billions of people around the world are currently vaccinated. Although studies on many mRNA vaccines began years before COVID, the work accelerated with the emergency created by the epidemic. Finally, the COVID-19 vaccines we have now appeared.
However, no medical intervention is risk-free, and despite its benefits, side effects can occur. What these side effects might be needs to be investigated. Since the clinical trials, there has been controversy about the side effects common to most vaccines, from localized pain to fatigue and even nausea. On the more serious and life-threatening side effects, a new JAMA article provides some important answers. And we can say that these results are positive.
Both Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA COVID-19 vaccines do not seem to cause serious health problems. The research was conducted by federal and private insurance scientists and they examined 23 specific serious and often fatal conditions. These included heart attack, stroke, appendicitis, blood clot formation, facial paralysis and Guillain-Barré syndrome.
Data were collected from 6.2 million people during the first six weeks after vaccination. The incidence of serious health outcomes was compared between the first three weeks and the last three weeks. As a result, there was no indication that the serious health problems seen in the community were caused by the vaccine. The incidence of serious outcomes does not increase significantly in the first 21 days after vaccination compared with 22 to 42 days post vaccination. The team also estimates that the number of confirmed cases of anaphylaxis is about 5 per million doses of the injected vaccine.
While this study is encouraging regarding side effects, it also has notable limitations. The team is outspoken that the power of statistical analysis over previous data is not good or strong enough to be preferable, noting that more data will resolve this limitation. There may be certain health consequences that were not evaluated in this study that could be important, or some may have been overlooked if they took more than six weeks of the study to appear.
It’s also worth noting that this is not a study of long-term effects and that researchers can only predict effects that bring some level of societal bias to the attention of healthcare physicians at relevant institutions.
The research was funded by the Center for Disease Control as part of the Vaccine Safety Data Link (VSD). Launched in 1990, the initiative conducts research on important questions of vaccine safety in large populations. . .
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