As soon as the COVID-19 vaccines arrived in late December 2020, they helped turn the pandemic around and paved the way for a return to normalcy. By some estimates, these devices have prevented approximately 14.4 million deaths worldwide.
A small number of people also experienced side effects.
Over a year, The New York Times spoke to 30 people who say they have been harmed by coronavirus vaccines. Their symptoms may turn out to be unrelated to the injection. But they, along with more than a dozen experts, felt federal authorities were not doing enough to investigate the complaints.
All vaccines carry some risk of side effects. More than 270 million Americans have received approximately 677 million doses of coronavirus vaccines, but even a rare side effect (for example, occurring in just 0.001% of patients) could prevent thousands of recipients from receiving the vaccine. may be affected.
In fact, more than 13,000 people have filed claims with a government fund that compensates for injuries caused by coronavirus vaccines. But only about a dozen people have received compensation so far, almost all of whom suffered from heart problems caused by the vaccine.
Here are four takeaways from our research.
For most people, the benefits of the coronavirus vaccine outweigh the risks.
Even the best vaccines and treatments have side effects. That doesn't negate their benefits or suggest that people should stop taking them.
For example, the rotavirus vaccine, with unmitigated success, causes intussusception (a life-threatening condition in which the intestine folds) in about 0.02 percent of vaccinated children. There is a possibility.
Some side effects caused by coronavirus vaccines may be rare as well. Hong Kong researchers analyzed the country's health records and found that about seven out of every million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine caused shingles attacks severe enough to require hospitalization. did.
Other side effects are slightly more common. The coronavirus vaccine can cause myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart, in one in 10,000 young men. (Myocarditis is one of four serious side effects recognized by federal health officials.)
Despite claims by some conspiracy theorists that vaccines have led to a spike in death rates, deaths from vaccines are extremely rare.
A more thorough analysis could show that for some groups, such as young men, the benefits of getting a coronavirus vaccine may no longer outweigh the risks. But for most Americans, the vaccine is still far safer than getting infected with the coronavirus itself.
Federal monitoring has found some side effects, but others may be missed.
To detect problems with vaccines, federal agencies rely on multiple databases. The largest vaccine adverse event reporting systems are useful for generating hypotheses, but they contain untested explanations for harm. There are also databases that combine electronic medical records and insurance claims.
These systems found blood clotting issues associated with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and a potential risk of stroke after mRNA vaccination, which is still under investigation. However, federal researchers lagged behind Israeli scientists in addressing myocarditis as a problem among young people.
America's healthcare system is fragmented, with medical records held by multiple unaffiliated companies. Symptoms are not all described in the same way in electronic medical records, making comparisons difficult. Insurance claims databases may not have records of vaccinations administered at mass vaccination sites.
The federal system may also miss symptoms that are difficult to explain or diagnose.
Proving that vaccination caused the disease is complicated.
Deaths, heart attacks, strokes, miscarriages and autoimmune diseases have occurred among the hundreds of millions of Americans vaccinated against the coronavirus. How do you differentiate between an illness caused by a vaccine and an illness that would have actually occurred?
The more rare the condition, the more difficult this question is to answer.
Judging only by the timing of certain problems appearing after vaccination can be misleading. Most famously, childhood vaccines were incorrectly associated with autism because the first hallmark often coincided with the immunization schedule.
Serious side effects may first appear in animal testing of vaccines. But given the country's desperate schedule for 2020, such research was almost impossible. The vaccine's clinical trials were aimed at testing its effectiveness, but are far from large enough to detect side effects that may occur in only a few people after a million shots.
Most independent studies of side effects are not large enough to detect or rule out rare events. Others searched only for a preset list of symptoms and may have missed rare outliers.
A panel of experts convened by the National Academies concluded in April that there was insufficient data on most side effects to confirm or deny a link to COVID-19 vaccination.
It may take years to understand the full extent of the side effects.
Federal health officials have acknowledged four major side effects of the coronavirus vaccine, but that doesn't include temporary injection-site soreness, fever and fatigue.
But a federal database shows that thousands of Americans have been diagnosed with the coronavirus vaccine as having symptoms such as ringing in the ears, dizziness, foggy head, rapid changes in blood pressure and heart rate, new or recurrent autoimmune diseases, hives, vision problems, etc. It has been reported to cause kidney damage, tingling, and numbness. and loss of motor skills.
Several studies have investigated reports of side effects and largely concluded that there is no association. Further investigation may reveal that many, perhaps most, of the other reported side effects are unrelated to vaccination. Most of them are related to the new coronavirus and could be the result of an undiagnosed infection. But experts say it's impossible to know for sure without detailed research.