There has been a lot of debate out there in recent years about vaccines, and the COVID-19 vaccine only added fuel to the fire. How safe are vaccines, really? Are they worth getting? Do the long-term benefits outweigh the risks?
While I can't answer these questions for you, I can tell you why I chose to get vaccinated against COVID-19.
First of all, I want to make it clear that I do feel getting vaccinated should be a personal choice. If you choose not to get the vaccine, I'm not judging you! I do think that we aren't always told about all the side effects that may occur from vaccines, and as I have discussed in a previous post, there are plenty of people who would say that they can be much more dangerous than the mainstream medical establishment would have you believe. However, vaccines have also provided untold benefits to human society, and we almost certainly would not be as successful and long-lived as a species without them.
All this to say, I am not an "anti-vaxxer," but I would describe myself as a "responsible vaxxer." (I do think it is completely irresponsible to give a baby with a developing brain of a few months old a cocktail of multiple drugs designed to protect against diseases they likely won't be exposed to for many years, if ever, but that's a discussion for another day.)
As a natural health blogger, a number of people have asked me my thoughts about the COVID vaccine, and while I was initially on the fence, here's why I ultimately decided to get vaccinated.
While I can't answer these questions for you, I can tell you why I chose to get vaccinated against COVID-19.
First of all, I want to make it clear that I do feel getting vaccinated should be a personal choice. If you choose not to get the vaccine, I'm not judging you! I do think that we aren't always told about all the side effects that may occur from vaccines, and as I have discussed in a previous post, there are plenty of people who would say that they can be much more dangerous than the mainstream medical establishment would have you believe. However, vaccines have also provided untold benefits to human society, and we almost certainly would not be as successful and long-lived as a species without them.
All this to say, I am not an "anti-vaxxer," but I would describe myself as a "responsible vaxxer." (I do think it is completely irresponsible to give a baby with a developing brain of a few months old a cocktail of multiple drugs designed to protect against diseases they likely won't be exposed to for many years, if ever, but that's a discussion for another day.)
As a natural health blogger, a number of people have asked me my thoughts about the COVID vaccine, and while I was initially on the fence, here's why I ultimately decided to get vaccinated.
Last summer and fall, with the race on to find an effective vaccine for this disease, I read articles on all sides of the debate - pro and con. It was too early to tell what would happen on the vaccine front, but one thing that was clear was that any vaccine that would be released would come to the general public with FAR less testing than a normal vaccine.
This made me quite wary as you can imagine, considering my usual caution around vaccines in general. While I wouldn't say that I was opposed to getting vaccinated against COVID-19, I was not in a big hurry to run out and get a vaccine as soon as it became available. I was glad that the rollout, when it came, prioritized older people - on the one hand, because those were the higher-risk groups who were more in need of protection, but on another, more selfish front, because I could see what the results were on a larger scale before my turn came.
Before I got my vaccine though, there were two other considerations that I needed to come to terms with:
1. Immediate Side Effects
First of all, I understand that ALL drugs have side effects, even though not everyone experiences them all. (Yes, even Ibuprofen has potential side effects - some of them quite serious.) So the question wasn't if there would be side effects, but how bad they would be, and how long they would last. Given the small size of the clinical trials (Pfizer's vaccine - which was the one I got - was tested on only 20,000 test subjects prior to release. 20,000!!), it was hard to judge exactly how widespread the side effects would be.
As it turns out, according to the Pfizer fact sheet I received when I got my vaccine, 60-70% of recipients experience some side effects, which is extremely high. However, most were mild, with the most common being pain at the injection site. Other common side effects included headache, fatigue, chills, body aches, fever, and nausea. (Kind of like having a mild case of COVID for a day?)
I am sure there have probably been rare cases of more severe reactions, and, in fact, allergic reactions can be quite serious, which is why they make you wait 15 minutes after your injection so they can monitor any immediate effects. However, by the time I received my first shot, 180,000,000 Americans had received at least one COVID vaccine, so my fears on this front were largely alleviated.
2. Long-Term Risks
This is a trickier question, as when it comes to long-term effects from these vaccines, we simply don't know what they will be.
The two most widely-available COVID-19 vaccines in the U.S. - made by Pfizer and Moderna - are made with a relatively new vaccine technology that uses messenger RNA (mRNA) to trigger our bodies to produce an immune response. I won't go into the whole process here, but you can read more about how mRNA vaccines work here. mRNA vaccines differ from the more commonly used types of vaccines which use a piece of the dead/deactivated virus to trigger the body's immune system. Unlike traditional vaccines, these new vaccines don't contain any of the actual virus. While previous experiments have been done using mRNA technology, these two vaccines are the first successful vaccines of this type that have been launched on any type of large scale.
I considered the known facts about these vaccines for some time, and ultimately, I decided that it was worth the risk of the unknown for a few reasons. One, because while it's true that we don't know the long-term effects of the vaccine (and won't for years to come), we also don't know all of the long-term effects of the coronavirus itself - and from what we've seen so far, some may be quite serious.
Not getting the vaccine means this insidious virus will continue to replicate, multiply, and mutate - perhaps developing into new strains that are even more contagious, more deadly, and more destructive. It means that even those who have been vaccinated may be exposed to new versions of the virus that are resistant to the vaccine by those who have not been vaccinated. Not enough people getting vaccinated means businesses and schools remaining closed, countless people suffering and dying of the virus (and new variations), travel being curtailed, and economic and personal ramifications continuing to echo across the globe. With this in mind, it began to feel like a civic duty to get vaccinated.
Not to mention, it is also hard to quantify the long-term health risks of many things that we put into our bodies - from chemicals in the food we eat and the water we drink, to other pharmaceutical drugs, and even toxins in our personal care products. While we can take steps to minimize this toxic load on our health, it's not as if we can avoid - or even know - all of these risks. I'm not saying that's an excuse to go hog-wild and take every drug that comes along, but when weighing the known risks against the unknown, I decided for myself that I was comfortable taking the risk of getting a COVID-19 vaccine.
While it took a few months for me to come around, by the time my age group opened up for vaccination in Ohio, I was ready.
In fact, I don't think I've ever looked forward to getting a shot before! (I told the administering nurse this, and she laughed.)
I was ready to hug my friends. Ready to go out to dinner. Ready to sit on a patio at happy hour with friends without having to worry about putting a mask on every time I get up from the table. I was ready to go back to church - in person - and sing without fear. (Although I don't actually know how long it will take for the fear to completely subside. How long will it be before I can sit in a crowded bar without being overwhelmed with anxiety? How long before I can attend an outdoor festival and stand in line for food with strangers? How long will my "personal space" be closer to 6 feet than my previous 1-2?)
Regardless, I was ready.
My Vaccine Experience
I got the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine on a Thursday evening. After having taken several days of searching to find an available appointment, I had been disappointed when I had to cancel it after a coworker came down with COVID. After waiting the required two weeks after exposure, I was surprised to find it was now remarkably easy to get an appointment, so I booked one for after work.
The vaccination site was at a local medical center, and the whole process was quite quick and efficient. There was no line, and no waiting at all, except for the 15 minutes after the injection. The staff were all friendly and helpful, and the shot itself was barely painful. The injection site burned for an hour or two afterward, and was rather red. The next day, my upper arm was incredibly sore for most of the day, making movement difficult. However, moving it seemed to help a lot, so I pushed through the pain, and waved my arm around repeatedly throughout the day. By evening the pain had subsided and it was essentially gone the next day.
The second shot was the one I was dreading, and fortunately, I was able to schedule it for a Friday, so I would have the weekend to recover. My entire immediate family (except for one sister) had gotten the Pfizer vaccine. Two of my sisters had fairly severe side effects similar to the flu the next day, while my mother and father both had slightly milder symptoms, including arm pain, fatigue, and headache.
I assumed I would have a similar reaction, which I was not looking forward to, but I was pleasantly surprised...
The actual process was similar to the first shot, although the gentleman who administered my injection was not at all friendly and was in fact a bit unpleasant. I headed for home, on a mission to complete some of my weekend tasks before the side effects kicked in. I spent half an hour doing some intense weeding in the yard, and then completed filing our taxes, while my sisters texted me with warnings about how bad I would feel the next day.
I went to bed a bit early, feeling quite tired. Overnight, my head felt heavy and throbbed dully every time I woke up, but not enough to keep me awake. In the morning, I felt a bit tired but not bad, so I fed the chickens and did some light weeding, after which I became rather light-headed and dizzy. I came inside, ate something, and sat down for a bit. My body felt heavy and slow, as though I was moving through molasses. I sat at the computer and did my blogging, and by around 2:30pm, I had regained most of my energy and was mostly back to normal. Even my arm barely hurt. It was quite anticlimactic, and nowhere near as bad as I had feared! (I had secretly been somewhat looking forward to a day of napping and watching TV...) ;-)
So here I am, fully vaccinated, and by my birthday next weekend, I will be able to hug my friends, go to happy hour, and eat out at a restaurant. We will see about the comfort level, but for now, I'm excited!
There are still many unknowns - both with this disease and the vaccine. For example, how long does immunity last? Will we have to get a vaccine booster next year? Or even in 6 months? Will new strains of the virus eventually prove impervious to the current vaccine? These answers remain to be seen, but for now, I plan to enjoy the summer, love on my friends and family, take vacations, sit on a patio with friends, and love life! :-)
I hope that you will be able to do these things as well...
To your health,
Rose.
This made me quite wary as you can imagine, considering my usual caution around vaccines in general. While I wouldn't say that I was opposed to getting vaccinated against COVID-19, I was not in a big hurry to run out and get a vaccine as soon as it became available. I was glad that the rollout, when it came, prioritized older people - on the one hand, because those were the higher-risk groups who were more in need of protection, but on another, more selfish front, because I could see what the results were on a larger scale before my turn came.
Before I got my vaccine though, there were two other considerations that I needed to come to terms with:
1. Immediate Side Effects
First of all, I understand that ALL drugs have side effects, even though not everyone experiences them all. (Yes, even Ibuprofen has potential side effects - some of them quite serious.) So the question wasn't if there would be side effects, but how bad they would be, and how long they would last. Given the small size of the clinical trials (Pfizer's vaccine - which was the one I got - was tested on only 20,000 test subjects prior to release. 20,000!!), it was hard to judge exactly how widespread the side effects would be.
As it turns out, according to the Pfizer fact sheet I received when I got my vaccine, 60-70% of recipients experience some side effects, which is extremely high. However, most were mild, with the most common being pain at the injection site. Other common side effects included headache, fatigue, chills, body aches, fever, and nausea. (Kind of like having a mild case of COVID for a day?)
I am sure there have probably been rare cases of more severe reactions, and, in fact, allergic reactions can be quite serious, which is why they make you wait 15 minutes after your injection so they can monitor any immediate effects. However, by the time I received my first shot, 180,000,000 Americans had received at least one COVID vaccine, so my fears on this front were largely alleviated.
2. Long-Term Risks
This is a trickier question, as when it comes to long-term effects from these vaccines, we simply don't know what they will be.
The two most widely-available COVID-19 vaccines in the U.S. - made by Pfizer and Moderna - are made with a relatively new vaccine technology that uses messenger RNA (mRNA) to trigger our bodies to produce an immune response. I won't go into the whole process here, but you can read more about how mRNA vaccines work here. mRNA vaccines differ from the more commonly used types of vaccines which use a piece of the dead/deactivated virus to trigger the body's immune system. Unlike traditional vaccines, these new vaccines don't contain any of the actual virus. While previous experiments have been done using mRNA technology, these two vaccines are the first successful vaccines of this type that have been launched on any type of large scale.
I considered the known facts about these vaccines for some time, and ultimately, I decided that it was worth the risk of the unknown for a few reasons. One, because while it's true that we don't know the long-term effects of the vaccine (and won't for years to come), we also don't know all of the long-term effects of the coronavirus itself - and from what we've seen so far, some may be quite serious.
Not getting the vaccine means this insidious virus will continue to replicate, multiply, and mutate - perhaps developing into new strains that are even more contagious, more deadly, and more destructive. It means that even those who have been vaccinated may be exposed to new versions of the virus that are resistant to the vaccine by those who have not been vaccinated. Not enough people getting vaccinated means businesses and schools remaining closed, countless people suffering and dying of the virus (and new variations), travel being curtailed, and economic and personal ramifications continuing to echo across the globe. With this in mind, it began to feel like a civic duty to get vaccinated.
Not to mention, it is also hard to quantify the long-term health risks of many things that we put into our bodies - from chemicals in the food we eat and the water we drink, to other pharmaceutical drugs, and even toxins in our personal care products. While we can take steps to minimize this toxic load on our health, it's not as if we can avoid - or even know - all of these risks. I'm not saying that's an excuse to go hog-wild and take every drug that comes along, but when weighing the known risks against the unknown, I decided for myself that I was comfortable taking the risk of getting a COVID-19 vaccine.
While it took a few months for me to come around, by the time my age group opened up for vaccination in Ohio, I was ready.
In fact, I don't think I've ever looked forward to getting a shot before! (I told the administering nurse this, and she laughed.)
I was ready to hug my friends. Ready to go out to dinner. Ready to sit on a patio at happy hour with friends without having to worry about putting a mask on every time I get up from the table. I was ready to go back to church - in person - and sing without fear. (Although I don't actually know how long it will take for the fear to completely subside. How long will it be before I can sit in a crowded bar without being overwhelmed with anxiety? How long before I can attend an outdoor festival and stand in line for food with strangers? How long will my "personal space" be closer to 6 feet than my previous 1-2?)
Regardless, I was ready.
My Vaccine Experience
I got the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine on a Thursday evening. After having taken several days of searching to find an available appointment, I had been disappointed when I had to cancel it after a coworker came down with COVID. After waiting the required two weeks after exposure, I was surprised to find it was now remarkably easy to get an appointment, so I booked one for after work.
The vaccination site was at a local medical center, and the whole process was quite quick and efficient. There was no line, and no waiting at all, except for the 15 minutes after the injection. The staff were all friendly and helpful, and the shot itself was barely painful. The injection site burned for an hour or two afterward, and was rather red. The next day, my upper arm was incredibly sore for most of the day, making movement difficult. However, moving it seemed to help a lot, so I pushed through the pain, and waved my arm around repeatedly throughout the day. By evening the pain had subsided and it was essentially gone the next day.
The second shot was the one I was dreading, and fortunately, I was able to schedule it for a Friday, so I would have the weekend to recover. My entire immediate family (except for one sister) had gotten the Pfizer vaccine. Two of my sisters had fairly severe side effects similar to the flu the next day, while my mother and father both had slightly milder symptoms, including arm pain, fatigue, and headache.
I assumed I would have a similar reaction, which I was not looking forward to, but I was pleasantly surprised...
The actual process was similar to the first shot, although the gentleman who administered my injection was not at all friendly and was in fact a bit unpleasant. I headed for home, on a mission to complete some of my weekend tasks before the side effects kicked in. I spent half an hour doing some intense weeding in the yard, and then completed filing our taxes, while my sisters texted me with warnings about how bad I would feel the next day.
I went to bed a bit early, feeling quite tired. Overnight, my head felt heavy and throbbed dully every time I woke up, but not enough to keep me awake. In the morning, I felt a bit tired but not bad, so I fed the chickens and did some light weeding, after which I became rather light-headed and dizzy. I came inside, ate something, and sat down for a bit. My body felt heavy and slow, as though I was moving through molasses. I sat at the computer and did my blogging, and by around 2:30pm, I had regained most of my energy and was mostly back to normal. Even my arm barely hurt. It was quite anticlimactic, and nowhere near as bad as I had feared! (I had secretly been somewhat looking forward to a day of napping and watching TV...) ;-)
So here I am, fully vaccinated, and by my birthday next weekend, I will be able to hug my friends, go to happy hour, and eat out at a restaurant. We will see about the comfort level, but for now, I'm excited!
There are still many unknowns - both with this disease and the vaccine. For example, how long does immunity last? Will we have to get a vaccine booster next year? Or even in 6 months? Will new strains of the virus eventually prove impervious to the current vaccine? These answers remain to be seen, but for now, I plan to enjoy the summer, love on my friends and family, take vacations, sit on a patio with friends, and love life! :-)
I hope that you will be able to do these things as well...
To your health,
Rose.
RSS Feed