Hello, welcome to my channel Medicine with Dr. Moran. If you've not been here before my name's
Dr. Keith Moran. I'm a consultant in internal medicine. In this video I'm going to talk
about Covid-19 vaccination side effects I will talk about the benefits as well as the risks.
I want to use real data not just anecdotal data. I can tell you that from my personal
experience with my own personal patients that I've seen over the past eight months I would
estimate that I've talked to about 2,000 different people and I've not seen any serious side effects.
obviously there have been people who have had a sore arm or fever or flu-like symptoms for
a few days with the injections but I've not seen anything more than this. It's important
in medicine though to not go by your anecdotal experience but to actually look at unbiased data.
I want to talk about a large observational study that looks at vaccine side effects
that was recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine. As I've mentioned in previous
videos whether you have been vaccinated or not the virus can still get into your nose and there can
be breakthrough infections. Current CDC statistics indicate that out of 168 million Americans
who have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19 thus far there have been 6,059 hospitalized
patients with Covid breakthroughs which amount to 0.003%. The percentage of these people who
have been fully vaccinated are 0.0006%. This shows how good the vaccines are against severe disease
and hospitalizations as I speak here at the end of August 2021. Now I could pick statistics from
many different countries who have high percentages of fully vaccinated people. The statistics aren't
any different no matter which country or region that I choose. I do want to show some statistics
and these are the ones from LA county. As you can see on the graph the hospitalization rates
are 25 to 30 times higher if you're not vaccinated versus being fully vaccinated.
You can see even partially vaccinated people have a markedly reduced chance of hospitalization.
Unfortunately there's no statistics for those people who have been naturally infected
as those who are not vaccinated but had previous natural infections do have protection as I've
said in many of my natural immunity videos. These are the most current statistics from August 27,
2021 from the province of Ontario in Canada. Now Ontario is the largest province in Canada and
would include cities like Toronto and Canada's capital city Ottawa. This is the current ICU
statistics which show that only 9 out of 105 ICU admissions are in fully vaccinated people.
These are the statistics for hospitalization in Ontario and on this graph you can see that only
27 out of 183 people are fully vaccinated. There are over 76% of Ontarians over the age of 12
who are eligible for vaccines who are fully vaccinated with 83% having at least a single dose.
So the vast majority of people are vaccinated yet they comprise a small amount of the people
who are in hospital right now. This speaks volumes to the success of the vaccinations.
The vaccines induce not just antibodies against the spike protein in the bloodstream but also
memory B-cells and long-lived plasma cells in the bone marrow which can produce antibodies again if
one happens to get re-exposed. There are also memory T-cells specific to the spike protein.
Now these ultimately circulate in the bloodstream to prevent the infection going from your nose and
mouth getting into the bloodstream and spreading to your organs. One of the things that I think
is getting lost in the media coverage is that these antibodies are obviously circulating in
the bloodstream and they're not at the mucosal level in the mouth and nose.
Now when I say mucosal surface I'm talking about the lining of the nose and the mouth.
Ideally what we want are antibodies at the mucosal surface of our mouth and nose
which are special kind of antibodies we call them IgA antibodies. Now as you can see on this slide
the antibodies we have in the bloodstream are initially a type called IgM which is the first
kind of antibody that our body will produce. The IgM antibody can be made very quickly and it's the
first antibody that we make. So the IgM antibody is made quickly but then subsequently it goes away
and at the same time a different kind of long lasting antibodies made for the bloodstream called
IgG. When it comes to vaccinations our bodies do not make mucosal IgA antibodies from the vaccine.
Your body does make mucosal IgA from natural infection although I've not seen a lot of research
about mucosal IgA induced by natural infection. IgA antibodies can be induced with nasal vaccines.
There are some in the development phase which are exciting.
Intranasal vaccines can induce Immunoglobulin A as well as resident memory B and T cells
in the nasal passageways and upper airways. They would be expected to prevent infection
right at the source and reduce virus shedding and may very well replace the intramuscular vaccines
that we currently are using. An intranasal vaccine certainly would be more acceptable to certain
people rather than an injection. I have a link to the science article in the description below.
This is certainly worthy of another video in the future. Now back to the study about
vaccine side effects in the New England Journal. This of course has been published and by that I
mean it has been peer-reviewed already. Here is the article the data was taken from the largest
healthcare organization in Israel and it was done to look at the safety of the Pfizer MRNA vaccine.
This is an observational study. They individually matched vaccinated people
to unvaccinated people according to both clinical and socio-demographic variables.
They looked at side effects from the time of vaccination up to 42 days after vaccination.
The authors point out that there were a number of potential adverse events
identified during the phase 3 clinical trials including Bell's Palsy and there was an imbalance
between the vaccinated versus placebo group with respect to things like Appendicitis,
hypersensitivity reactions, heart attacks, and strokes. The thing to point out though
is that the phase three trials have inherent limitations in accessing safety because of a
smaller number of participants in an obviously healthier than average sample population
and so they can be underpowered to identify much less common adverse effects.
This is why we do post marketing surveillance to monitor the safety of any drug or vaccine.
In the U.S. they have the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System which I've mentioned in previous
videos and I have encouraged people if they did have side effects to report them directly.
The information there is voluntarily reported by health care providers as well as the public and
is meant for quickly identifying potential safety signals. What we want is high quality safety data
out in the real world and this until now has been quite sparse in our medical literature. There was
a study based on more than 600,000 vaccinated people that was recently published along with
some other smaller studies but these studies lack controls to compare the vaccinated people too
the study authors point out that there was a recent study that did incorporate a control group
but they only had 8,500 in the vaccinated group. Now the authors of the study concluded that the
MRNA based vaccines had an acceptable safety profile looking at the 8,500 people that they
accumulated. Now the New England Journal study I'm about to tell you about had a much larger
number of participants. They looked at an average of 884,000 people who were vaccinated
over the age of 16 starting in December 2020 in Israel. They individually matched
each vaccinated person to an unvaccinated person according to clinical variables
and other demographics. Here are their results. This is the top part of the chart on adverse
events associated with the Pfizer vaccination. As you can see there were more people with
Appendicitis in the vaccinated group versus the control group which was 95 versus 66 people
but the risks are relatively small when you look at the number of people which were
900,000 in each cohort group. So that would mean that they were 95 with Appendicitis out of 900,000
if you're vaccinated versus 66 out of about 900,000 if you were not. Now the appendix does
have Lymph tissue and so the slight increase in Appendicitis was not completely unexpected.
There was more Bell's palsy with 81 people versus 59. Bell's palsy in some people is likely
autoimmune in some cases and so the increase here may be secondary to an overactive response of the
immune system to the vaccine. In addition there were more Herpes Zoster at 283 versus 204. Herpes
Zoster is Shingles which is the reactivation of the Chickenpox virus in a sensory nerve
that can lead to a painful rash and sometimes even persistent pain when the rash goes away.
This occurs sometimes with vaccinations as the immune system is responding to the vaccine which
means it may not be responding well enough to keep other foreign agents such as the Chickenpox virus
which stays dormant in our sensory nerve cells if we have been infected in the past. There also
was more Lymphadenopathy which means lymph node swelling which we would expect from vaccination
as there's an immune response going on to the vaccine and so in the lymph nodes you will see a
lot of B-cells and T-cells that will be specific to the vaccine in this case the spike protein.
This was seen in 660 people as you can see on the slide in the vaccinated group versus 279 in the
control group. Now this is the bottom half of the table. Here you can see that there's an increase
for Myocarditis 21 in the vaccinated versus 6 in the control and for Pericarditis also 27 versus
18. This has been seen in other studies and I do make note that they did not find an association
between the Pfizer vaccine and blood clots in this study. We know that in the AstraZeneca
and Johnson & Johnson vaccines that there is an increased risk of blood clots. Now all of these
numbers I provided need to be put in context. There are very they are very infrequent risks
and comparing them to the benefits of the vaccine which is very efficacious against severe Covid-19
illness. When people of course are admitted to the hospital with Covid-19 the main patient complaints
typically are lung symptoms which can develop into respiratory failure. Other complications
of course can occur during the infection such as blood clots in the leg and lung, as well as acute
kidney injury, heart attacks, inflammation of the heart, as well as hemorrhage inside the brain.
To give you an idea acute kidney injury occurs in 125 people out of 100,000 people infected with
Covid-19, heart attacks are in 25 per 100,000, leg clots in 43 per 100,000 lung clots in 62 per
100,000 and brain hemorrhages in 8 per 100,000. I must speak about the limitation of the study. All
studies do have some limitations. A big plus with this study of course is a large number of people
even though it was an observational study where they tried to match people up.
They did not randomize these people rather there was matching going on which is obviously
a limitation. They also excluded healthcare workers and people who live in long-term care.
There is always the possibility that some diagnoses could even have been missed.
Also it's possible that some of the people were more likely to seek medical care for
symptoms after vaccination resulting in an increased incidence of various adverse events.
The study authors point out that the findings help shed some light on the short and medium-term
risks of the vaccine and place them in context clinically. Further studies
of course will be needed to estimate the potential of any long-term adverse events.
I present this study today to give people an idea of what the short-term risks are from the Pfizer
vaccination and to try to put them in the context of the illness itself. Giving people this kind of
knowledge empowers people to understand the risks and the benefits of interventions in medicine.
It forms the cornerstone of any good medical practice. Thank you for joining me today on
Medicine with Dr. Moran. my name is Dr. Keith Moran. Remember get healthy and stay healthy.