COVID-19 vaccine side effects: The need for a dedicated information website

Italy COVID vaccines: Undue priorities prevail
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Avatar of Behrouz Pirouz
Written by Behrouz Pirouz

Human body organs are correlated to each other, and unexpected effects of a medicine may occur. It has happened that common medicines which used to be sold without need of a medical prescription have suddenly been banned worldwide.

  1. Where could one find registered possible unexpected symptoms after the COVID-19 vaccination?
  2. Almost 500 million people to date have received the different COVID-19 vaccines, out of whom 135 million received also the second dose.
  3. Research on common as well as rare cases is important, especially for the most adverse cases, as happened when deaths and thrombosis occurred a few weeks ago which led to the suspension of AstraZeneca.

Such was the case, for example, of Ranitidine, a popular heartburn drug discovered in 1976 and in commercial use since 1981 whose withdrawal from the market was requested one year ago by the FDA. In other cases, some medicines are still allowed but their use requires special attention, as in the case of โ€œTamsulosin,โ€ an usual medicine for the prostate that could affect the eyes, which requires special care when a patient who is taking it must have cataract or glaucoma surgery.

These medicines are actually used by minor fractions of the population. Despite this, a web search for their side effects would easily find accessible references as well as for similar medicines of limited use.

For COVID-19 vaccine side effects, this is not so. This may be is surprising, considering that they are being used by an incomparably larger fraction of the population, which in perspective would actually be almost the entire world population. The information that is provided by the producers is, of course, available, but this is based on the adverse cases occurred during the vaccine test phase. The size of test samples amounts to a few tens of thousands, an order of magnitude less than the almost 500 million people, who until now have received the different COVID-19 vaccines, out of whom 135 million received also the second dose without need to say that these figures are growing day after day as the vaccination campaign progresses.

The broadening of the sample makes possible the appearance of new rare effects that did not arise in the test phase. Besides the most common adverse cases, the effects of low statistical incidence must also be detected and studied. Nevertheless, a simple check in a search engine like Google posing questions such as, โ€œWhere can I write my strange symptoms after COVID-19 vaccination?โ€ or โ€œrare symptoms after COVID-19 vaccinationโ€ shows that such a website does not exist where one could find registered possible unexpected symptoms after a COVID-19 vaccination.

One can only find a few articles like โ€œWhat are the side effects of the AstraZeneca vaccine?โ€ โ€œWhat are the side effects of the Pfizer vaccine?โ€ A quick look at them confirms that besides the most popular symptoms, there are also a few that are rather rare. For example, 4 out of 600 people commented having had bladder problems after the AstraZeneca vaccination, an effect that is not mentioned in the usual lists of possible problems detected during the test phase. Something analogous happens for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Among more than 200 comments on side effects, 2 of them also report bladder problems, and 15 report a body tingling which in some cases lasted up to 2 weeks.

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Behrouz Pirouz

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