As an emergency medicine doctor in Michigan’s Thumb, Dr. Mark Hamed has seen hundreds of patients with COVID-19, but no one with a bad reaction to a COVID vaccine.
“Not one,” said Hamed, who also is the medical director for the public health departments in Huron, Lapeer, Sanilac, Tuscola, Alcona, Iosco, Ogemaw and Oscoda counties.
That parallels the experience of Dr. Liam Sullivan, an infectious disease specialist at Spectrum Health in Grand Rapids: Countless patients with complications from COVID and very few with complications from the vaccine.
“There’s just no comparison at all,” Sullivan said. “We’ve had how many thousands of (hospital) admissions for COVID-19, and probably less than 10 admissions for some (COVID) vaccine-related thing, I would guess.”
Dr. Michael Zaroukian, a Lansing-area family physician who specializes in immunology and is affiliated with Sparrow Hospital, said he hasn’t heard of any hospitalizations at Sparrow related to a COVID vaccine reaction.
“It’s extremely clear that the risk associated with acquiring COVID and the risk of death from COVID are huge and obvious and a public health crisis,” Zaroukian said. “The number of cases of (serious) complications related to COVID vaccination absolutely happen, but they’re absolutely rare.”
Safety concerns about the COVID-19 vaccines are one of the top issues cited by those reluctant to be inoculated, with some suggesting that the vaccines are even more risky than COVID itself.
That’s not borne out at all by the data, experts say.
In the past week alone, more than 7,000 Americans died of COVID and almost 95,000 are currently hospitalized for the virus. There are reports of COVID patients overwhelming emergency departments and intensive care units in Florida, Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.
Meanwhile, 5.1 million vaccine doses were administered last week, with nary a news report about a vaccine-related death or serious complication.
To be sure, no vaccines are 100% risk free, and that’s true of COVID shots.
But the risk of complications from the virus are hundreds or thousands of times greater compared to serious complications from the vaccine, depending on someone’s age and underlying health conditions.
As of Aug. 24, the United State has reported almost 2.6 million COVID hospitalizations and about 628,000 deaths. Respectively, that’s about 7% and 1.7% of the nation’s 38 million confirmed COVID cases.
That doesn’t include non-hospitalized person with “long COVID,” in which symptoms such as fatigue, headaches, brain fog and respiratory issues continue for weeks or months after the initial infection. Long COVID can affect even people that had mild cases of COVID. It’s estimated that 10% to 30% of COVID patients have lingering symptoms.
By comparison, more than 200 million Americans have had at least one dose of a COVID vaccine. Since December, the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System – or VAERS – has received 27,440 reports of hospitalization and 6,789 reports of death involving people who have received the COVID vaccine, but those numbers come with a huge caveat.
Vaccine providers are encouraged to report “any clinically significant health problem following vaccination whether or not they believe the vaccine was the cause,” the VAERS website says. Vaccine recipients also can self-report health issues.
That means VAERS numbers include “incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental and unverified information,” the VAERS website says. “The number of reports alone cannot be interpreted or used to reach conclusions about the existence, severity, frequency or rates of problems associated with vaccines.”
The coincidence factor is especially important when, as is the case with the COVID vaccine, so many people are being vaccinated in a relatively short period of time.
As an example, an estimated 2,400 Americans die a day from a heart attack or stroke. With 364 million doses of vaccine administered so far, it’s inevitable some people had fatal strokes or heart attacks shortly after getting a COVID shot. The challenge for VAERS officials is determining whether vaccines increase the probability of those deaths.
So federal officials have identified several serious health issues linked to the vaccine, but they also stress those issues remain very, very rare. In fact, two of the issues – myocarditis in young men and blood clots in women – are a much, much more common complication of the COVID virus vs. the COVID vaccine.
Here’s a look at the specifics:
- Anaphylaxis: About two to five people per million can experience a serious allergic reaction to the vaccine. This reaction, called anaphylaxis shock, which is potentially life-threatening but treatable, and is the reason that people are asked to wait for 15 minutes after receiving a vaccine.
- Myocarditis: As of Aug. 11, federal officials have confirmed 762 reports of myocarditis or pericarditis among people 30 and under who have received the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine. Myocarditis is an inflammation of the heart muscle and pericarditis is an inflammation of the sac around the muscle. Males age 12 to 17 are at highest risk, and the risk for them is estimated at 63 cases per million people, or about .006%. However, the COVID virus itself carries a much bigger risk of myocarditis. In a recent study of Big 10 athletes who contracted COVID, 2.8% of the males developed myocarditis, which is more than 400 times the myocarditis risk associated with the vaccine.
- Thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS): This issue with potentially life-threatening blood clots has been linked to the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. To date, there have been 42 cases of TTS among the 13 million J&J shots administered. Women under 50 have been most affected. That said, potentially life-threatening blood clots are a common complication of COVID-19, and it’s estimated that almost a third of COVID patients in intensive care units develop thromboembolism.
- Guillain-Barre Syndrome: VAERS has received 161 reports of Guillain-Barre Syndrome after the J&J vaccine. GBS is an autoimmune disorder that can cause muscle weakness and paralysis, although the majority of people recover. The U.S. has about 3,000 to 6,000 cases of GBS a year, and a small percentage of those are linked to flu shots or other vaccines. Officials say they are “monitoring” reports of GBS to determine if the COVID vaccine increases the risk of Guillain-Barre Syndrome. GBS also can be triggered by the COVID virus itself, according to the Mayo Clinic.
To see the vaccine as riskier than the virus itself is like people who refuse to wear a seatbelt “because they heard of someone who drowned in a car accident because they couldn’t get their seatbelt off,” Zaroukian said. “You can always come up with a story about the rare exception of where doing something that should keep you safe was in this instance less safe.”
He encourages people to take a hard look at the numbers: The chances of severe illness from COVID may be, for most people, less than 10% but it’s a much, much bigger possibility than having a severe reaction to the vaccine.
Even for children, who are at lower risk for severe COVID, the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of getting vaccinated, said Dr. Rosemary Olivero, a pediatric infectious disease specialist with Spectrum Health.
“The chance of an adverse effect from getting the vaccine are so extremely low, and the risk of a negative consequence of COVID-19 probably ranges anywhere from 3% to 10% for a child,” which includes the risk of hospitalization; long COVID and/or multisystem inflammatory condition syndrome, a serious complication that can develop a month or so after a child has had COVID, she said.
While the VAERS reports of deaths and hospitalizations overstate COVID vaccine risks, Hamed points out that even if one took those numbers at face value, the risks associated with the virus are far, far more greater than the risks linked to the virus.
“We know for a fact that COVID kills people,” with more than 600,000 deaths in the United States so far, Hamed said. “It’s misinformation” to say that VAERS has linked almost 7,000 deaths to COVID. “That’s false. But even if it were true, that’s a lot better than the deaths caused by COVID.”
Read more on MLive.com:
Even if masks aren’t mandated, parents should send kids to school wearing one, doctors say
7 things parents should know about COVID risks for schoolchildren
COVID risks for the fully vaccinated: What we know and what we don’t about Delta
More than 20% of recent COVID cases, hospitalizations have been among Michigan’s fully vaccinated
Weighing the risks of COVID vaccines against the risk of the COVID virus - MLive.com
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