Several candidates for coronavirus vaccination have been approved for emergency use around the world. Most Western countries use a combination of Pfizer / BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca / Oxford vaccines. The medicine Johnson & Johnson has just approved the revision of the regulations and is also now available in different countries. In addition, Russia and China use their own vaccines and have exported their medicines to other markets. Nearly 276 million vaccine doses have been administered worldwide since Thursday morning, while 58 million people have received the full two-shot regimen.
Several new studies have provided much additional evidence that the vaccines can effectively prevent severe COVID-19 and deaths. The drugs are also well tolerated and usually have minimal side effects. The list of side effects includes injection site pain and brief flu-like symptoms. An extremely low number of allergic reactions have also been seen with certain vaccines. And now doctors have noticed a strange new COVID-19 side effect that in some people may take more than a week to occur. Fortunately, it is extremely gentle and not at all worrying.
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The new symptoms appear a few days after the second shot. The arm may become red, sore, itchy and swollen, The New York Times reports. The reaction appears to be harmless and should not be confused with an infection. A letter in The New England Journal of Medicine addresses the symptom, as observed in people who received the Moderna vaccine at Massachusetts General Hospital.
The letter describes 12 cases of delayed skin reactions that appeared about 8 days after the first shot. The symptoms then disappear about six days after onset. The patients were advised to continue with the complete treatment, and all completed the vaccination course. Three patients had a similar response after the second shot. But the skin lesions appear faster, two days after the second jab, and last up to three days thereafter.
Some of these delayed skin reactions included lesions greater than 10 cm in diameter. Other patients experienced rashes in skin regions that were further away from the injection site, such as the palm and the elbow. Some patients have also experienced fatigue and muscle aches, which are the side effects associated with COVID-19 vaccines. The following set of photos shows the types of skin lesions that can occur:
Some patients were treated with antihistamines, others required steroids, and one accidentally prescribed an antibiotic.
The authors of the letter want to make people aware of this type of side effect so that patients and doctors know that such side effects are possible. The authors also recommend treatment with antibiotics to resolve the skin issues:
Clinicians may not be willing to address delayed local reactions to treatment [Moderna] mRNA-1273 vaccine. Given the scale of mass vaccination campaigns around the world, these responses are likely to cause concern among patients and requests for evaluation. These reactions are not consistently acknowledged, guidance regarding the second dose of vaccine has varied and many patients have been given unnecessary antibiotics. We hope that this letter encourages additional reporting and communication regarding the epidemiological characteristics, causes, and implications of these delayed cutaneous responses, as this information may alleviate patients’ concerns, encourage vaccination completion, and reduce the unnecessary use of antibiotics.
Dr. Kimberly Blumenthal, one of the authors of the letter, tells The times that these symptoms led the Massachusetts General Hospital to change the patients’ handover. “We said it’s normal for you to get redness, itching and swelling when you get the vaccine,” she said. “We changed the wording and said it could also start seven to ten days after you receive the vaccine.” The allergy expert also said that she does not understand why the delayed skin reactions only appeared in patients who received the Moderna vaccine and not the BioNTech drug. Both are mRNA vaccines.
The Massachusetts General Hospital has set up a registry to detect patients with delayed skin reactions. According to Blumenthal, about 30 cases have been seen so far, and most of them are women.
Moderna did report delayed skin reactions after its phase 3 trial, saying that 0.8% of volunteers experienced it after the first dose and 0.2% after the second jab. The NEJM a letter indicates that the delayed reactions in the Moderna trial were not fully characterized. Here are the most common side effects of the Moderna vaccine, as listed by the FDA:
The most common side effects, which usually lasted a few days, were injection site pain, fatigue, headache, muscle aches, chills, joint pain, swollen lymph nodes in the same arm as the injection, nausea and vomiting and fever. It is noteworthy that more people experience these side effects after the second dose than after the first dose, so it is important that vaccine providers and recipients expect that there may be side effects after any dose, but even after the second dose.
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Chris Smith started writing about hobbies as a hobby, and before he knew it, he was sharing his opinion on technological things with readers around the world. If he does not write about equipment, he can not stay in it, even though he is desperately trying. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.