This week, social media was flooded with an avalanche of headlines documenting a seemingly troubling case of COVID-19 in a San Diego nurse who fell ill about a week after receiving his first dose of Pfizer coronavirus vaccine.
However, experts said that his disease is not something unexpected: it is known that the protective effects of vaccines take at least a couple of weeks to materialize. And they noted that getting sick before completing the two-dose vaccine program should not detract from the effectiveness of the Pfizer product, which reached the final stage of clinical trials very successfully.
Reporting that a person who has not received the full dose of the vaccine has COVID-19, “it’s actually like saying someone came out in the middle of an umbrella-free storm and got wet,” commented Taison Bell, a physician. intensive care at the University of Virginia. Bell received his first dose of the Pfizer vaccine on Dec. 15 and will soon receive his second dose.
The 45-year-old California nurse, identified as Matthew W. in an ABC10 News report, received his first injection of the Pfizer vaccine on Dec. 18. According to news reports, six days later he began to feel mild symptoms, which included chills, muscle aches and fatigue. One day after Christmas, he tested positive for the virus.
Megan Ranney, an emergency physician at Brown University, noted that this should not cause concern. “¿¿¿And what ???” he tweeted on Wednesday in response to a Reuters article about the nurse’s illness. “It’s a two-dose vaccine.” Ranney received his first dose of the Pfizer vaccine on December 18th.
Ranney noted in an interview that considering the nurse’s illness to be news implies that it was something that was not within what was expected … and that there must have been protection for about a week. after the first dose of the vaccine. By no means is this the case.
Vaccines take at least a few days to deploy their protective effects. Pfizer’s formula is designed around a molecule called messenger RNA, or mRNA, which, once injected, enters human cells and instructs them to make a coronavirus protein called a spike. None of these components are infectious or capable of causing COVID-19. But they act as impostors of the coronavirus and teach the body to recognize the real virus and fight it in case it gets inside.
Spike production is thought to occur within a few hours of the first dose. But the body requires at least several days to memorize the material before it can unload its entire arsenal of defense weapons against the virus. Immune cells take this time to analyze the protein, mature, multiply, and sharpen its reflexes to identify the ear.
Data from Pfizer clinical trials indicate that the vaccine may begin to protect its recipients from the disease approximately one or two weeks after the first dose. A second injection of mRNA, administered three weeks after the first, helps the immune cells send the most important characteristics of the virus to memory, which consolidates the protection process.
Ranney noted that the California nurse’s disease timeline fits very well into the post-vaccination vulnerability window. It is also very likely that you became infected with the virus near the date you were vaccinated, perhaps even before. If people get symptoms of VOCID-19, they may begin to feel two to fourteen days after becoming infected with the coronavirus.
Recently, a similar situation appeared to appear with Mike Harmon, the auditor of the state of Kentucky, who this week tested positive for the virus a day after receiving the first dose of an unspecified vaccine. against coronavirus.
“It appears that, unknowingly, I may have been exposed to the virus and become infected shortly before or after receiving the first dose of the vaccine on Monday,” he said in a statement. Harmon reaffirmed his “total confidence in the vaccine and the need for so many people to receive it and as soon as possible.”
Pfizer spokeswoman Jerica Pitts noted that the vaccine’s protective effects are “substantially potentiated after the second dose, which supports the need to apply a two-dose series of the vaccine.”
“People may have contracted the disease before or just after vaccination,” he commented.
It was found that when administered the full two-dose program of the Pfizer vaccine, it has a 95 percent efficacy in preventing symptomatic cases of COVID-19, a figure that was received as very newsworthy. good now that coronavirus cases have been on the rise. However, this leaves a small percentage of people who will not be protected after getting vaccinated, Ranney said. “There is no vaccine that is one hundred percent effective.”
It is also not known how effectively it can protect the Pfizer vaccine against asymptomatic infections or whether it will significantly reduce the ability of viruses to pass from one person to another. This means that measures such as mouthpieces or social distancing are still essential, even after receiving full vaccination.
The information gathered by Pfizer during the clinical trials in the final phase suggested that the vaccine could offer at least some protection after receiving a single dose. But the goal of the study was not to specifically test how effective a single-injection treatment would be.
Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious disease specialist at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine, said two of her colleagues tested positive shortly after their first dose. “Given the speed with which cases are increasing, none of this surprises me,” he commented. Because the effects of the vaccine are not expected to be immediate, “this should not be considered a vaccine failure.” Kuppalli, who received the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine on December 15, added that taking COVID-19 between doses of the vaccine should not discourage anyone from receiving a second dose, after consultation with a health professional.
In recent weeks, more than 2.7 million people in the United States have received their first dose of the Pfizer vaccine or a similar one from Moderna. The two vaccines consist of two injections, and as they reach more and more people, it is important to maintain good communication about how and when vaccines work, Bell said.
“For now, we have to stick to the doses that were determined in the trials,” he noted. “That’s what will give us maximum efficiency.”