COVID vaccines and neuropathy

I'm sorry to hear you are feeling these symptoms again after so long.
Side effects are reported after the Covid vaccines, and parasthesia is one of them - usually affecting the injected arm, but also other areas more rarely. However, the usual onset is within 7 days of receiving the vaccine, and nearly all symptoms disappear within 30 days.
Since it took a very long time for you symptoms to appear after the injection, you should consider consulting with your PCP or neurologist.
While we hear about Covid vaccine side effects everywhere, everyday, it is possible that it could be a coincidence and not a reaction to the injection.
Sue

I had Morderna got really sick with both. My antibodies were too high and my Dr. thinks it may have caused my neuropathy now on me. Mine is in my arms and hands. Although, I did have a bad case of Covid as well.

Can you tell us when you had the vaccine and when the neuropath began? Has it changed or improved?
Sue

Thanks Sue, the points you raised made us rethink the potential causes of the paresthesia and we had clearly overlooked a Shingles vaccination I had that would more closely align the dates to with 7 days. Come Monday I will build a timeline of all my recent events of covid , flu and shingles vaccinations and the onset of the paresthesia.
Thanks again.

Aha! Good detective work. Shingles vaccine can similarly cause autoimmune reactions as it stimulates the immune system.

I am not near my computer now, but when I am, I'll look at the Vaccine Adverse Reaction System (VAERS). I'll do a quick query and see what's been reported. Can you tell me which shingles vaccine you received?

By the way, my first major reaction was to Shingrix, my 2nd to the Quadravalent flu shot. And again, of course to Pfizer. All resolved over several weeks.
Sue

Sorry, no idea at present of which vax’d I received.

So, with that in mind, I searched the data base (you can find it here: https://wonder.cdc.gov/vaers.html) for all adverse reports from Shingles injections over the past 2 years.
First, some caveats:
- Roughly 100 million people in the US have been vaccinated against shingles over the years, but I don't know how many per year - best number I could find was 3 million per year, but that's not very solid
- Not everyone reports their adverse reactions to their doctors, so we don't know how many total reactions there were, -just how many people considered theirs severe enough to report.

That said, in the past 2.5 years, there were 22,000 reports of reactions and of those roughly 500 reported some sort of facial paresthesia. Since this is an incident report, we don't know how long the aftereffects lasted.

So, like the Covid vaccine, many people get the injections and a few people get lingering reactions. It will be interesting to hear what the doc has to say... let us know how you are doing in the next few weeks.

Sue

I had my second pfizer shot this week. Not sure why I thought my immune system would react differently to the same enemy. Well it hasn't. Just like the first time. Intense burning in feet and hands which even my megadose of Lyrica since after the first vaccine isn't touching. Happydays!

Hi. So sorry to hear that. How long did you wait between first and second dose?

On both of my Pfizer vaccinations my neuropathy flared up in my feet. I really never experience pain, just numbness and tingling. Not bad but noticeable.