- Experts say the three COVID-19 vaccines now in use as well as those in clinical trials are highly effective.
- They urge people to get the first vaccine that’s available to them rather than wait on one that might be slightly more effective than another.
- Getting a vaccine that’s less effective than others is still much better than having no vaccine at all, experts say.
Which COVID-19 vaccine should you get?
Whichever one you can get into your arm first, medical experts say.
When the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, first emerged more than a year ago, there was no vaccine to fight COVID-19, the disease it causes.
Now there are three vaccines authorized by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), with more in advanced stages of development.
The vaccines take different approaches to fighting COVID-19, and effectiveness varies slightly as well.
However, experts say the bottom line is that any vaccine is better than no vaccine in preventing COVID-19. And, if you do get COVID-19, a vaccine increases the chances that you’ll have a mild rather than severe bout of the illness.
“Here’s my attitude toward the vaccine: Get what you can and as soon as you can get it,” Dr. Ramin Ahmadi, the chief medical officer for Graduate Medical Education Global LLC, told Healthline.
“Get the first one available,” agreed Dr. Steven Quay, a COVID-19 researcher, author of “Stay Safe: A Physician’s Guide to Survive Coronavirus,” and CEO of Atossa Therapeutics Inc. “They all keep you out of the hospital and keep you from dying, and those are big things.”
Dr. L. J. Tan, chief strategy officer of the Immunization Action Coalition, told Healthline that while a lot of concerns about the COVID-19 vaccines have been raised — from the reasonable to the outlandish — research has proven most of these theories to be unfounded.
For example, he said, when the FDA issued emergency use authorizations for the first two COVID-19 vaccines, the agency brought in independent experts to review safety data on the vaccines.
And while those new vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna use groundbreaking messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, Tan said that researchers have been familiar with such vaccines for at least 15 years.
Both vaccines also far exceeded the FDA’s threshold for effectiveness of emergency vaccines, which was set at 50 percent.
“Those of us involved with these vaccines were not surprised at how safe and effective they are,” Tan said in late January. “We have now vaccinated more than 20 million people and we see that the sky is not falling.”
About 1 in 4 people experience some sort of side effects from receiving the COVID-19 vaccine, but it’s mostly fever or soreness at the injection point.
Reported side effects and (rare) allergic reactions are pretty consistent among the approved vaccines, although a recent report found that some recipients of the Moderna vaccine have experienced delayed rashes at or near the injection site.
Rather than being alarmed, vaccine recipients should view such symptoms positively, Tan said.
“If I feel crappy, I’m happy because it shows your immune system is doing its job, and I know the vaccine took,” he said.
Overall, the COVID-19 vaccines are causing fewer side effects than the vaccine for shingles but somewhat more than the flu shot, according to Tan.
Swatting away another myth, he noted that the vaccines can’t give you COVID-19 because the viral material they contain is “absolutely dead.”
Source: healthline