JAB VOLUNTEER TELLS: IT FELT GOOD TO FEEL BAD

IT WILL be your passport to freedom but prepare to feel lousy for 24 hours after you receive your COVID-19 vaccine. Clinical trial participants have warned short-lived fever, headache, muscle pain and exhaustion are among the sideeffects they experienced.

And some doctors are worried the side-effects might dissuade people from coming back for the second jab they will need to be properly protected. US journalist John Yang, who volunteered to be Patient 232 in George Washington University’s trial of Moderna’s COVID vaccine, wrote for pharmaceutical industry journal STAT about his experience of receiving the vaccine. “I had been warned I might feel sick after getting the injection. I felt fine through bedtime, which disappointed me because it made me think I had gotten the placebo,” he wrote.

“The next morning, though, I was, paradoxically, heartened to begin feeling feverish, fatigued, and achy — like I had a mild case of the seasonal flu. It felt good to feel bad. It wasn’t enough to keep me from my daily routine, but it did persist. I felt a little better every day.”

After his second shot Yang said it didn’t take long for every muscle and joint to ache and “my temperature to hit 99.9. I was in bed asleep by about 7pm and didn’t wake up until about 6am”. However, he reported that just as the effects came on faster, they resolved faster. Moderna reported the majority of adverse events in its trial were mild or moderate in severity.

Around 2.7 per cent of people experienced injection site pain after the first dose and after the second dose 9.7 per cent suffered fatigue, 8.9 per cent experienced muscle pain, 5.2 per cent had joint pain, 4.5 per cent suffered headache, 4.1 per cent general pain and 2 per cent had redness at the injection site.

Jenny Hamilton, a 57-year-old former police officer from Atlanta in the US, took part in Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine trial.

She told Business Insider that after receiving the first two injections, she felt like she’d caught a virus, developing lowgrade fevers, fatigue and muscle ache.

Pfizer reported that of the 43,000 participants in its trial there were no serious safety concerns; 3.8 per cent suffered fatigue, 2 per cent suffered a headache. In the Astrazeneca vaccine trial, local injection site reactions and systemic reactions occurred in between 66 and 80 per cent participants.

Paul Griffin, the principal investigator for Nucleus Network, which is trialling four COVID-19 vaccines, said “no vaccine will ever be produced that doesn’t have some adverse effects”.

“What’s clear is that the benefit outweighs those risks and certainly if the benefit doesn’t clearly outweigh the risks, we don’t proceed with human trials,” he said.“The key thing is to make sure people are aware of what the adverse effects are likely to be, and how to manage them.”

People having the vaccinations should be told to prepare by having paracetamol or ibuprofen beforehand to reduce those effects, Dr Griffin said.

“We know a vaccine for this virus is a way to getting back to as close to normal as possible, and the trade-off of a bit of a sore arm for a few hours, or feeling tired the afternoon of the vaccine, would be a very acceptable price to pay for protecting yourself and everyone else,” he said.