COVID-19 vaccines have become somewhat notorious for their side effects: fatigue, arm pain, perhaps fever. In some rare cases, there are more serious complications, such as inflammation of the heart. So is it more risky to take a vaccine or take a risk with COVID itself?
A new one to study in the New England Journal of Medicine it was proposed to answer this question, comparing the moderate to severe symptoms experienced by people after the Pfizer vaccine with those experienced by people with COVID infection. (Mild reactions such as fever and pain at the injection site were not included.) Here’s what they found:
- People who received COVID had a substantially higher risk of arrhythmia (irregular heartbeat), myocardial infarction (heart attack), deep vein thrombosis (blood clots in places like the legs), pulmonary embolism (blood clots in the lungs), myocarditis (inflammation) of the heart muscle), pericarditis (inflammation of the tissues near the heart), intracerebral hemorrhage (bleeding in the brain) and thrombocytopenia (low platelet count).
- People who received the vaccine had a substantially higher risk of lymphadenopathy (swollen lymph nodes).
The study was conducted as an analysis of medical records in Israel and compared 884,828 vaccinated people with an equal number of unvaccinated controls and 173,106 people with a COVID infection and an equal number of controls. (Each person matched a check of age, gender, home location, and health status.)
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The vaccine involved was that of Pfizer, so this analysis may not apply to other vaccines such as Johnson & Johnson. The Modern vaccine is very similar to the vaccine Pfizer, so it is likely the results would be similar if the same study could be done with this vaccine.but without the numbers, we don’t know for sure.
“What is even more compelling from these data is the substantial protective effect of vaccines against adverse events such as acute kidney damage, intracranial hemorrhage, and anemia, probably because the infection was prevented,” writes Grace Lee, professor of medicine at Stanford. who wrote one editorial comment about the study.
He also points out that the best way to compare risk would include the possibility of being exposed to COVID; if it is a rare disease, you are much more likely to get a serious adverse event from the vaccine than from being infected, which could change the risk / benefit calculation. But the way the Delta variant he is currently in a rage, COVID is not a rare disease.
She writes: “Given the current state of the global pandemic, however, the risk of exposure to SARS-CoV-2 [the virus that causes COVID] it seems inevitable. ”