COVID-19 Vaccine Issues?

7 min

Worry over the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines kept many people from getting their shots at first; that worry persisted even after hundreds of millions of people around the world were vaccinated.  Even as variants of the original virus swept the globe, making it clear that vaccination was our best defense against serious illness or death, reports of adverse events associated with the vaccine made some people understandably concerned.  In February 2024, a study of 99 million vaccinated individuals in eight countries confirmed what smaller, earlier reports had suggested: there is a small increase in the risk of certain serious conditions after receiving the vaccine. After looking at the data, I still believe the risk/benefit analysis remains heavily on the side of getting the vaccine.

The multinational study was conducted by the Global COVID Vaccine Safety Project, which was established in 2021 to take a large-scale look at potential safety issues with the new vaccines. For this study, researchers determined the expected pre-pandemic incidence of 13 different conditions in a large population and compared it with the actual incidence of those conditions in 99 million people in the six weeks following vaccination against COVID. They found small increases in the incidence of myocarditis and pericarditis, mostly in those who had received the mRNA vaccine (Moderna or Pfizer),  and similar increases in Guillain-Barré syndrome and cerebral venous sinus thrombosis in those who had received the AstraZeneca shot. This aligns with what early reports had suggested, which is that some people were experiencing heart, brain, or blood conditions after vaccination.

I have been vaccinated and boosted and I am a strong proponent of inoculation for all who are eligible.  That’s because the expected incidence of each of these conditions studied is extremely small, so even doubling the incidence still makes it a very, very rare event. If you are not vaccinated, your risk of death or serious illness from COVID itself is far higher than your risk of developing any of the conditions associated with the vaccines.

We saw this in 2021, when deaths from COVID in the unvaccinated continued to soar even as they fell dramatically in the vaccinated population. When the delta and omicron variants emerged that year, severe illness and death were almost entirely in the unvaccinated (leading some to call that year’s surges the Pandemic of the Unvaccinated).

Keep in mind, the COVID-19 vaccines first became available in the United States in late 2020 and rolled out throughout 2021. By June of that year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had found that the two mRNA vaccines reduced the risk of COVID infection by 91%. The vaccines were also found to have a protective effect against severe illness and hospitalization if a vaccinated person did contract the disease. The vaccines had not stopped the pandemic, but they had already made a dramatic difference in protecting health.

By May 2023, when the CDC published its final vaccination count, some 270 million Americans (more than 81 percent of the population) had received at least one dose, with more than 230 million fully vaccinated (meaning they’d had their second dose). More than 56 million Americans had received an updated (bivalent) shot by then. That amounted to nearly 700 million individual doses delivered, with very, very few serious adverse effects. A 2023 analysis in Cureus of more than 21 million COVID-19 cases showed that the unvaccinated were about two and a half times more likely to die from it than vaccinated patients were.

Globally, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that more than 13 billion doses of the vaccine had been administered by June 2023. The vast majority of those getting the vaccine reported only mild side effects, primarily soreness at the injection site. This is not to deny that some serious adverse events are occurring, but to make it clear that the risk of those events is extremely small.

A 2023 study in Nature Communications looked at the risk of death in young people in the United Kingdom after either receiving the vaccine or testing positive for COVID-19. The study found very little connection between death and the vaccine, but did show an uptick in risk of death following infection with the virus. Curiously, there was also an increase in risk of cardiac-related death for young women after a non mRNA vaccine.

Additionally, there have been reports of allergic reactions in those receiving the COVID-19 vaccine. As a rule, allergic reactions to vaccines are rare and reportedly occur at a rate of about one in a million, although some data suggest higher rates with the COVID vaccines. According to the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, however, people with common allergies are “probably no more likely than the general public to have an allergic reaction to the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.”

The CDC has put vaccination at the top of its list of twentieth-century public health achievements in the United States, noting that it resulted in either control or complete eradication of smallpox, polio, measles, rubella, tetanus, diphtheria, and other scourges that once claimed millions of lives every year. Yet in 2019, even before the current pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) named vaccine hesitancy as one of the top 10 threats to global health. Resistance to getting vaccinated has led to outbreaks of diseases that should no longer be prevalent, and it threatened our ability to get past the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 vaccines were brought to market in a remarkably short time frame, which is an amazing accomplishment that shows what science can do when properly resourced and focused. I know there is some fear that safety may have been sacrificed in the rush to distribute shots, but there is no evidence of that – all vaccines went through all the steps of testing safety and effectiveness – and none of the vaccines rely on new science. (The mRNA versions have been in development for decades.)

Long-term data on these vaccines will continue to be published for decades, but after four years the evidence is clear that we are at much, much greater risk from the virus than we are from the vaccine.  Balanced against the very real benefits of getting vaccinated, the risk of complications from the shots is extremely small.

You may want to watch a video series on the different vaccine types and how they work from Randy Horwitz, M.D., Ph.D., the medical director of the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine.

The 5 Types of Vaccines (https://youtu.be/1GzzsNy_Tk0)

The COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3K0I6KrwkEI)

COVID Vaccine Trials (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLirkm2i0eU)

See my advice on protecting yourself against Covid-19 and its variants.

Stay well!

Andrew Weil, M.D.

Sources
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Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “COVID-19 Vaccinations in the United States” (Accessed 2/19/2024)  covid.cdc/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations_vacc-people-booster-percent-pop5  

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Originally Posted December 2020. Updated February 2022. Updated March 2024.