Originally Posted by
j44ke
Over and over again, the science says benefits outweigh the side effects, especially given the newer risk of more highly contagious variants. You don’t want to get covid but if you do, you definitely want symptoms mitigated as much as possible.
My whole family is skinny. We have assorted allergies, some skin, some airborne. So far all of us have gotten at least first vaccines. Some have gotten both. My reaction was similar to getting a tetanus shot or a flu shot. Or maybe one of each. Sore arm, a bit foggy headed for a day with some weird body temp fluctuations. My wife had no reaction whatsoever. She’s the one who is highly affected by insect bites, but she didn’t even miss a step after the vaccine. At the inoculation center, their primary interest is whether you’ve ever had a serious reaction to a vaccine in the past. Like passing out. If so, they put you in a waiting area for 30 minutes and assign an observer to you (at least they did where I got my shot) and then the EMT’s are right there at the ready.
However if you are prone to anxiety, that may be a worthwhile thing to communicate. So if this is part of her hesitancy, then she should mention it during the process. The person administering my vaccine was a nurse. She had a very calm and confident approach, and her questions were for important information, not just a recital, even though she had obviously asked them many times before. So I can see where telling the staff about one’s anxiety would be received in the same way as any other medical information.
All the reading I’ve done says the variants are going to become more of a factor this spring and summer. Already in NYC, the numbers of new cases and deaths have plateaued, and health officials are warning of a new wave. By getting vaccinated, you are helping to move toward herd immunity and lessening the potential severity of covid should you somehow become infected by a variant that slips past. And if she does have sensitivities to things in her body, better she has some relatively minor side effects from the vaccine than a possibly heightened reaction to a covid infection.