Improper vaccination can cause pain

Dear Dr. Roach: About two weeks ago, I received the vaccine for COVID-19. By the next day I had a great deal of pain in the shoulder area where the vaccine was administered. For about five days, I could barely lift my arm. It is still sore but the pain is subsiding, and I can now fully raise my arm. If the vaccine got into the bursa (as described in a recent column), would it still have been absorbed into my bloodstream so that I could get immunity?

R.M.

Answer: Shoulder injury related to vaccine administration is a seldom-reported

— but probably more prevalent than thought — adverse vaccine event. It happens when the vaccine is injected not into the muscle, as it should be, but into the bursa space below the muscle.

This results when the injection site is too low or the needle is placed too deeply.

Vaccines are intended to cause a response by the body, but doing so in the bursa will cause weeks of poor shoulder function. It is treated with physical therapy and sometimes steroid injection.

Vaccines do not go into the bloodstream. Both the

Moderna and the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines are an mRNA vaccine.

The mRNA is taken up by the muscle cells, and the muscle cells use the information in the mRNA to start making a COVID-19 protein.

It’s not the whole virus, so it is impossible to get COVID-19 from the vaccine. The mRNA is then destroyed, but not before the muscle cells have made enough COVID-19 protein that the body has learned how to fight it off.

While it is possible that the cells around the bursa could express some COVID-19 protein, I recommend that a person who developed SIRVA after COVID-19 vaccination restart the two-dose vaccine series.

The fact that you are getting better after five days makes me think you do not have SIRVA. Five days is longer than most people have arm pain as a side effect, but it’s nothing like the six weeks of shoulder motion restriction seen with SIRVA.