More than 50% of Spaniards already have the complete vaccination schedule. Vaccines have undoubtedly been a turning point in this pandemic. However, they have generated endless questions, something that on the other hand is still normal.
Many, for example, have wondered why there are people who have side effects after the injection of the vaccine and others do not. “Could it be that whoever reacts has the immune system fitter?” “Will the vaccine work for those people who have not had any side effects after the needle stick?” “Why don’t older people just react to the injection?” They wonder.
Not everyone has the same side effects after receiving doses of the vaccine
To begin with, it is necessary to emphasize that the fact of having or not having side effects after the injection has nothing to do with the effectiveness of the vaccine. The reaction to the injection is related to what is called the innate response, while the effect of the vaccine is related to the adaptive response.
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“Having or not having a primary reaction to the vaccine (fever, joint pain, fatigue …) does not condition the possibility of getting immunized correctly”, he explains to The vanguard Dr. Manel Juan, head of the Immunology Service of the Hospital Clínic de Barcelona. According to Juan, “there are people who have this primary reaction and others who do not, in the same way that there are people who get sick from the virus and others who do not.”
“The immune response is the adaptive one,” he continues, “the one that comes later and the one that manages to eliminate the viruses.” It is the one that, in the words of Dr. Manuel Hernández, head of Immunology at Hospital Vall d’Hebron, “will produce antibodies and memory T cells to respond, in this case, against the peptides that have been incorporated into the vaccine” .
The level of immunization of vaccines is very good regardless of the body having had that primary reaction “
In any case, Dr. Juan reiterates, “the level of immunization of vaccines (and also of those who have had the disease) is very good regardless of whether or not the body has had this primary reaction. It has no significance ”.
Both physicians agree to value as “logical” the fact that some people have had a reaction to the second dose when they hardly noticed anything in the first. In the same way, they also call it natural to have had side effects after the second puncture when there was a reaction in the first.
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“It is normal that if your body has had a primary reaction after the first dose, it has another after the second, although not in 100% of cases. It is what we call training, your body is trained to react, it already did it the first time, ”says Dr. Juan.
“It also occurs regularly, although not always,” he adds, “that those who did not react after the first dose do so a little in the second. And it’s also because of training, which is a concept that we use in immunology. To put it in some way, you beat the first mark, when your body did not react ”.
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It should be noted that “this training has nothing to do with the memory generated by vaccines (adaptive immunity), which is when antibodies and T lymphocytes (the cellular response) are created that directly kill, it can be said, to the cells infected by the virus ”, clarifies Dr. Hernández.
The innate reaction is acquired from birth. “It depends on your intrinsic capacity, which is determined by your genetic inheritance. But it is not black or white, because a mother and a daughter, for example, do not have exactly the same genetics ”, explains Dr. Juan.
The innate response, “more powerful in young people”
“Even in genetically identical individuals, twins, there can be differences. Not in the first vaccines, there they will react in the same way, but when they are given older ones, things vary. Why? Because throughout the antigenic experience, of contact with other microorganisms, the training of one and the other changes ”, he adds.
This innate response, says Dr. Juan, “is more powerful, in general, in young people.” That is why some people of a certain age do not react to any of the doses. “When young children complain because we vaccinate them (practically all do) it is not because they are more sensitive, that they are a bit more sensitive as well, but because it causes more inflammation and it hurts more. They have a greater innate reaction ”.
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The most frequent side effects after receiving any of the doses of the vaccine are fever, headache, muscle aches, chills, malaise, dizziness, pain in the puncture area, in the joints, in some cases fatigue … “In All cases are mild, they can appear in minutes or hours and last a day ”, emphasizes Dr. Hernández, head of Immunology at the Vall d’Hebron Hospital.
This doctor explains that in the face of different, more intense symptoms that occur in very few cases, it is necessary to react: “We have to be alarmed if we have chest pain (myocarditis or pericarditis) or in case of thrombosis, which can cause pain in certain areas, such as legs, or seizures and changes in mental status. It depends on which organ the thrombus affects, it can stop working properly ”.
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