• Question: why do vaccinations give you side effects?

    Asked by game520opah on 28 Jan 2025.
    • Photo: Kerry Gordon

      Kerry Gordon answered on 28 Jan 2025:

      If we eat something, drink something or inject something into our bodies, that “something” is likely to have several effects on us. Some of those effects are deliberate (desirable), whereas other effects will be less desirable.

      As an example, consider eating dinner on a regular basis (daily). The deliberate effect of putting food inside your body is to fill you up or, at least, to take away your hunger. Generally speaking, food does that rather well. But what about the undesirable effects of eating dinner regularly – are they any? What about possible indigestion? Putting on weight? Tooth decay? These don’t happen to everyone who eats dinner regularly (most of us), but they do happen to some of us on occasions – these are the side effects.

      And so it is with vaccines and other medicines. These have their deliberate (desirable) effects as well as their side effects. For example, consider getting an official COVID vaccine with a single dose from a needle into your arm – these vaccines have proved to be rather good at protecting you from catching COVID (their deliberate effect). But the dose entering your arm is an unrecognized molecule to your body – and, when your body spots any unrecognized molecules, it tends to react – here come the white (attacking) blood cells to take a look … and all those cells coming together, in the very area of your arm where the needle went in, cause … guess what … swelling. That’s the side effect.

Comments

  • Photo: Andrew M

    Andrew M commented on :

    You also have to consider the possibility of a nocebo effect. This is where the anticipation or expectation of a side effect causes a side effect to manifest. In this it complements the placebo effect where the patient experiences a positive outcome even when not being given any active active agent. Indeed patients in trials given a placebo can experience a nocebo effect when warned of the possible side effects of the trial drug they didn’t actually recieve.

    In my own case I suffered a day of flu-like symptoms following by first covid vaccination that I can’t be sure were genuine or a nocebo effect. I was warned that flu-like symptoms were possible; I anticipated flu-like symptoms; and more than that I wanted to get flu-like symptoms as evidence the vaccine had been effective and had tirggered an immune response. It came as no surprise then that that was what I experienced. For the second vaccine I was not anticipating a response, expecting the first vaccine to have alredy primed my immune system. As expected I didn’t suffer any side effects.

    Side effects can be both a genuine response, as Kerry explains, or a pyschogenic response. Both will be real to the sufferer.