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← Return to COVID vaccines and neuropathy
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Please let us know how you are doing over the next few days. I think we will see over time that these flares are the immune system going into "overdrive" in reaction to the vaccines, and it will resolve on its own, or with medication. According to infectious disease docs, the vaccine and its side effects are still better than the Covid infection.
I reacted to both the quadravalent flu vaccine last fall and the Pfizer vaccine with inflammatory flares. The flare with the flu vaccine was far worse, and ended with needing steroid injections.
The effects of the Pfizer vaccine began in earnest after the second dose, peaked at 3 weeks, and have since faded to a background annoyance.
It is important to keep in mind that even though you are reading about a lot if flares here on Connect, that does not mean it is necessarily happening a lot - I looked through VAERS data earlier this week, and it appears that about 10,000 people (.01% of the 100,000,000 fully vaccinated) are reporting neuropathy symptoms after Covid vaccines - most were transient, "pins and needles" that subsided quickly.
Compare this to people with a serious Covid infection who get neuropathy. 33,000,000 people have gotten Covid in the US and 9% (3,000,000) have been sick enough to be hospitalized. Of those seriously ill, 28% have neuropathy symptoms after recovery (about 890,000.) If you have an underlying condition, your chance of being among the hospitalized group rises to anywhere from 25 - 40%, and your chance of serious complications or an ICU stay also rises.
So here is a comparison to think about - if you get Covid, your chances of developing or worsening neuropathy are probably 250 times greater than getting it from the vaccine. That doesn't even take into consideration all the other awful effects of Covid - pneumonia, blood clots, death...
So your decision to have the vaccine was probably a wise one, even though it seems hard to believe when you feel so bad.
Sue
Replies to "Please let us know how you are doing over the next few days. I think we..."
I would think most if not all of the people on this particular site who are reporting adverse side effects from the vaccine have pre-existing conditions such as neuropathy or autoimmune conditions. It might be informative to know what the percentage is of these people who are reporting adverse neuropathy symptoms after the covid vaccine, not just the percentage of the entire population who has been vaccinated. I'm sure it is higher than .01%.
Also risk vs benefit, using numbers only, can get a bit complicated to assess. Not everyone who doesn't take a vaccine is going to automatically get covid.
Not bringing statistics into the mix, I do agree returning to a normal life would be a huge benefit. But there are risks for us with pre-existing conditions that have to be weighed.
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Thanks for your reply, Sue. You perhaps did not notice in my post that I stated I have already had Covid. Though it resulted in some deficits in taste and a worsening of my hearing in one ear (which I've been struggling with for years), it didn't cause any neuropathy and I was not hospitalized. I would have liked to have been informed about how long my natural immunity from having had the virus would last prior to being vaccinated, perhaps unnecessarily.