CMAAO CORONA FACTS and MYTH Local Reactions to vaccine

Author :Dr K Aggarwal President CMAAO, HCFI, with input from Dr Monica Vasudev

• Local reaction to Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine

India

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New Delhi, March 05, 2021 :

1. Can appear up to 11 days after vaccination and symptoms can persist for as long as 11 days, a team of Boston doctors warns in an online letter to The New England Journal of Medicine.
2. Their analysis of 12 patients with delayed reactions after the first dose of the vaccine found that when delayed reactions occurred, the median time to onset was 8 days and symptoms resolved after a median of 6 days.
3. Reactions didn’t always occur at the injection site. A 40-year-old woman developed papules on her palm and fingers that were believed to be the result of a shot. A 43-year-old man developed urticarial plaques on his elbows.
4. Many patients have unnecessarily received antibiotic agents” to treat them
5. About 84% of people who get their first dose of the Moderna vaccine have some type of reaction, such a muscle soreness or tenderness, and 0.8% of patients in the initial vaccine trial reported a delayed injection-site reaction on or after 8 days.
6. A delayed reaction such as erythema, induration and tenderness was less common — seen in 0.2% of patients — after the second dose. Most symptoms resolved after 5 days.
7. Recipients saw any immediate side effects disappear, only to have a reaction sometime between 4 to 11 days after the first dose. Their symptoms persisted for 2 to 11 days.
8. Five of the reactions in the 12 patients produced grade 3 plaques, meaning their diameter was at least 10 cm in diameter. Some had systemic symptoms associated with the vaccination.

The CDC is expected to soon release guidelines on safe activities for fully vaccinated people :

• The CDC will recommend that vaccinated people try to only socialize with other vaccinated people at home.
• They should still wear masks elsewhere while observing other safety measures, such as social distancing

Research by South African scientists suggests that antibodies triggered by exposure to the country’s dominant coronavirus variant can prevent infection by other versions of the virus.

1. The findings in laboratory studies offer hope that COVID-19 vaccines based on the B.1.351 (also known as 20H/501Y.V2) could also protect against other versions of the virus circulating in different parts of the world.
2.  The results were published ahead of peer review on the medRxiv website on Saturday (https://bit.ly/3b994hU).
3.  Penny Moore, a professor at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases, said the antibody response from the 501Y.V2 variant was only reduced threefold against the first-wave virus, whereas the response from the first-wave virus was reduced nine-fold against 501Y.V2.
4.  On Tuesday, Moore’s group also published a study in Nature Medicine showing that antibodies to the virus previously circulating in South Africa don’t neutralize the now-dominant B.1.351/501Y.V2 variant (https://go.nature.com/3bcU4zt).
5.  Major vaccine manufacturers including Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson were already making vaccines based on the B.1.351/501Y.V2 variant.
6.  By the end of 2021 most vaccine manufacturers would have adapted their shots, “not because they are specifically worrying about the virus coming from South Africa … but because key mutations in the 501Y.V2 are actually also present in many other variants”.

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