Does Johns Hopkins Medicine Recommend That I Get A Covid
Yes, we recommend that everyone who is eligible get vaccinated with one of the three currently authorized COVID-19 vaccines. Johns Hopkins Medicine is administering all three vaccines: Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson. We view all three as highly effective in preventing serious disease, hospitalization and death from COVID-19 , and we believe that their benefits outweigh their risks.
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Some Adverse Events Coincide With But Are Not Caused By Vaccination
Studies have shown that many common symptoms are not always caused by the vaccine but occur at the same time by chance.
Symptoms such as fever, rashes, irritability are common, especially among children.
It can be difficult to determine how many of these reactions are caused by a vaccine when the background rate in the same age group is unknown.
Medical conditions with unknown causes have been incorrectly linked to particular vaccines. The most prominent example is the claimed link between the measlesmumpsrubella vaccine and autism.
There is no established link between vaccines and autism. The MMR vaccine doesnt cause autism. Many studies and reviews over almost 20 years have found no link between the MMR vaccine and autism.
Phase Iii Clinical Trials To Assess Safety And Efficacy
Phase III clinical trials are critical to understanding whether vaccines are safe and effective. Phase III trials often include tens of thousands of volunteers. Participants are chosen at random to receive the vaccine or a placebo. In Phase III, participants and most of the study investigators do not know who has received the vaccine and who received the placebo. Participants are then followed to see how many in each group get the disease. Assessing short- and long-term safety is also a major goal of phase 3 trials.
Phase 3 trials may take six to nine months to allow early assessment of safety and efficacy, particularly if conducted in areas with a high risk of infection, but with follow-up continuing for two years or more to assess long-term safety and efficacy.
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How Vaccine Safety Is Monitored In Canada
In all provinces and territories, including B.C., health care providers are expected to report all adverse events to their local public health unit.
In B.C., a local medical health officer or Registered Nurse then reviews these reports and makes a recommendation for future immunization. If the MHO or RN identifies any vaccine safety concerns, they communicate them to the BC Centre for Disease Control and from there to the Public Health Agency of Canada .
The reports are then sent to the BCCDC for review. By gathering all the reports in one place for the whole province, we can identify rare but possible safety concerns.
The reports from the BCCDC are then sent to the Public Health Agency of Canada and added to reports from all provinces and territories in a national database. These reports are reviewed regularly to identify any safety concerns. With an even larger number of reports than at the provincial level, there is even greater opportunity to identify rare but possible safety concerns.
Vaccine safety is also monitored at the international level. The World Health Organizations International Drug Monitoring Program collects reports from over 75 countries and uses this global data set to monitor for any vaccine safety concerns.
More Information About Covid
Australians are encouraged to rely on reputable sources of information to help them make informed choices and stay up to date.
Information will be communicated through government channels, as well as states and territories and the health sector.
Reputable information about vaccines is available from:
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Eua Doesn’t Mean A Vaccine Is Less Safe Here’s What It Does Mean
The term “Emergency Use Authorization ” may sound like the COVID-19 vaccine is being distributed before it’s ready for prime time, but this is a misconception.
EUA simply means that the vaccine was prioritized to the top of the FDA’s queue of new therapies and devices to review. The FDA generally uses the EUA during a public health crisis, when there’s an immediate need for a vaccine or new treatment. For instance, early in the pandemic, convalescent plasma therapy was approved by the FDA via the EUA process.
“If a vaccine has received EUA, it means the FDA has deemed it safe and effective. The same Phase 3 clinical trials and the same scientific review panels previously mentioned will have carefully assessed the trial data and results, and with the same level of scrutiny as usual,” says Dr. Sostman.
Atlas Of Antiviral Defenses
The study involved two analyses: A comparison of adverse events between vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals, and between unvaccinated people infected with SARS-CoV-2 and unvaccinated noninfected people.
The study showed that few adverse events were associated with the vaccine. Myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle, the most serious of them, was rare, with a rate of 2.7 excess cases per 100,000 vaccinated people. This means that for every 100,000 individuals, 2.7 more cases of myocarditis occurred than would be expected, the researchers said.
Coronavirus infectionbut not vaccinationwas also associated with greatly increased risk of pericarditis , heart arrhythmias, heart attacks, strokes, pulmonary embolism, deep-vein thrombosis, acute kidney damage, among others.
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How Vaccines Are Made And Tested
The creation of a vaccine involves scientists and medical experts from around the world, and it usually requires 10 to 15 years of research before the vaccine is made available to the general public. The first step of this extensive process involves several years of laboratory research, in which scientists and researchers identify an antigen that can prevent a disease.
Once the test vaccine has been cleared for further investigation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, at least three more phases of thorough clinical trials are conducted on human volunteers to test vaccine efficacy, to determine appropriate dosage, and to monitor for adverse side effects, etc. These trials usually take several more years to complete. The last phase involves a test group of up to tens of thousands of human volunteers. Unsure if this is a large enough test group? Consider this – medicines in the United States also go through incredible scrutiny, but their test subject sample sizes are three times smaller than vaccine test subject groups.
The exhaustive amount of scientific evidence confirming that vaccines are safe should ease anyone’s concerns about how they’re made and tested. The flu vaccine is no exception.
Making Sure Vaccines Are Safe
Vaccines must be tested to make sure theyre safe and effective before being approved for use in Canada. Once a vaccine has been approved for use in Canada, its monitored for:
- safety
- effectiveness in people
Health Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada share the responsibility for ongoing safety monitoring, which also involves:
- provincial, territorial and local public health authorities
- health care professionals
Experts have developed many different types of vaccines to protect us from germs .
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Study Affirms Overall Safety Of Covid Vaccine Dangers Of Infection
6 min read
Over the past year, results from a series of clinical trials have demonstrated the efficacy and safety of COVID-19 vaccines in preventing serious illness, hospitalizations, and deaths.
Yet, with sporadic reports of rare adverse events, one question has remained unanswered: Just how safe are COVID-19 vaccines in the real world, outside of clinical trials?
Now, a study published Aug. 25 in The New England Journal of Medicine by researchers from Clalit Research Institute in Israel, Harvard Medical School, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health answers that question.
The research, which assessed the safety of the Pfizer/BioNTech BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine, is based on analysis of data from nearly 2 million individuals in Israel and represents one of the largest real-world assessments of COVID-19 vaccine safety to date.
The findings, the researchers said, affirm the overall safety of the vaccine and underscore that the risk of adverse consequences from actual infection with SARS-CoV-2 far outweighs potential vaccine risks.
Developing And Testing The Covid
Scientists used existing vaccine technology and some medical technologies that were new to vaccines, like mRNA, to explore ways of creating COVID-19 vaccines that worked and were safe to use in the general population. You can read more about the scientific process of vaccine creation on the CSIRO website.
Once a vaccine has been developed, it needs to be manufactured and tested for safety. All vaccines go through trials and tests as they are developed and before they are approved for use. This includes being tested on thousands of volunteers before they are approved. Testing happens in three main phases.
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How Are Vaccines Tested
Vaccine testing begins in the laboratory. If lab studies show that a vaccine has potential, it is usually tested in animals first.
If the vaccine is shown to be safe in animals, studies in people are next. People taking part in these studies are volunteers. They understand that a vaccine is being studied and are informed about the possible side effects.
There are three phases of studies in people prior to a vaccine being approved for general use. These studies start with very few people, but the final studies, that are designed to show both effectiveness and safety, will have hundreds or even thousands of subjects.
If a vaccine is being developed for children, it is usually tested on adults first.
Sidebar: Cruelty Freewhat Does It Mean
Many people look for cosmetics that are labeled cruelty free or not tested on animals. But cruelty free does not always mean the cosmetic was not tested on animals. Because the government has not legally defined cruelty free, it can mean many different things. While most cosmetic companies that label their products cruelty free use alternative safety tests that do not use animals, cruelty free can also mean:
- the final product was not tested on animals, but the ingredients were individually tested on animals.
- the manufacturer did not test the cosmetic on animals, but the company that supplied the ingredients did test the ingredients on animals.
- the animal testing was done by a different company.
- the animal testing was done in a foreign country.
- the animal testing was done more than 5 years ago.
If you would like to find out whether a product was tested on animals, you can contact the manufacturer and ask them to define their cruelty free label. You can also look for the Coalition for Consumer Information on Cosmetics logo. Products with this logo are marketed by companies that have agreed to not conduct or commission animal tests or use any ingredient that is tested on animals . This pledge is backed up by independent audits to ensure neither the product or its individual ingredients is tested on animals.
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What Safety Data Are There
Both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have undergone all three clinical trials and not found any serious side effects from their vaccines.
For the Pfizer vaccine, 195 people were recruited in the USA-based Phase I trial and 456 were included in the Germany-based Phase II trial. In both trials, nobody who received the vaccine had any serious side effects. Pfizer’s Phase III trial has been in a peer-reviewed journal and included over 40,000 volunteers in 152 sites worldwide.
In this trial, volunteers were divided into two groups. One group was given two placebo jabs 21 days apart, and one group the actual vaccine jabs. This means that in the end 18,566 people received the full 2 doses of the vaccine.
For 14 weeks after the second jab all 18,366 volunteers were assessed for side effects, both by surveys and taking blood samples. After the second jab, only 0.8 percent of them got a fever. More common symptoms were soreness at the injection site and sometimes sore muscles and headaches.
Professor Rick Kennedy from the Mayo Clinic explains that “the vast majority of the side effects seen were expected and are a direct result of the immune response to the vaccine. Side effects are similar to what has been seen with most other licensed vaccines and ore occurring at similar rates and with similar levels of severity .” No one in the study had a severe reaction to the vaccine.
Information On Available Vaccines
There are currently three COVID-19 vaccines available in the United States: the Pfizer vaccine, the Moderna vaccine, and the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
Heres whats important to know: Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are safer and more effective than the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine. Individuals who are unable or unwilling to receive an mRNA vaccine will continue to have access to Johnson & Johnsons COVID-19 vaccine. All three FDA-approved vaccines are effective at preventing serious illness, hospitalization, and COVID-19 related deaths. Getting vaccinated is the best way to protect yourself and your family from the risks of COVID-19.
Pfizer
Authorized for individuals ages 5 and up.Type: mRNADose: 2 doses 21 days apartHow well the vaccine works: Based on evidence from clinical trials, the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was 95% effective at preventing laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 illness in people without evidence of previous infection.
Authorized for individuals ages 18 and up.Type: mRNADose: 2 doses 28 days apartHow well the vaccine works: Based on evidence from clinical trials in people 18 years and older, the Moderna vaccine was 94.1% effective at preventing laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 illness in people who received two doses who had no evidence of being previously infected.
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How Come The Vaccines Were Made So Quickly
Usually, vaccines take years to be developed and produced. The COVID-19 vaccines took less than one year. This is due to a number of reasons, three of which are explained by Dr Robert Carnahan from the Vanderbilt University Medical Centre:
“One, all of the vaccines were manufactured ‘at risk’. This means that they were being produced before the clinical trials were even completed. This would never happen in a normal situation. Many of these costs were supported by various government organizations around the globe. Therefore, the instant that emergency approval was secured, the distribution could begin.
Second, vaccine developers were rapidly analyzing data as they emerged and communicating this in real-time to various regulatory agencies. There are often gaps of months to years between the various phases of clinical trials due to these activities alone.
Third, recruitment to clinical trials is often a slow and laborious process. There have to be people ‘at-risk’ for the disease in many different demographic and health categories. Due to the immense scope of the pandemic, finding sufficient and appropriate volunteers was rapid.”
How Quality Control Measures For Vaccine Production Are Developed
Companies do not come up with these quality control measures entirely on their own, and there is considerable regulatory oversight. Relevant regulatory bodies, such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration or the European Medicines Agency play an integral role in the vaccine development and production process for their country. From the beginning, scientists from each regulatory organization review quality control documentation and data from company and institution scientists working on developing the vaccine, and then continue to do so at checkpoints throughout the process. The review process helps guide, define, and validate the appropriate quality control measures for the vaccine.
Similar approaches are at work in other countries regulatory agencies as well, which means that every vaccine and production process is ultimately reviewed by multiple regulatory agencies. This team-based approach means that multiple scientists from each organization involved are able to review everything about the vaccinefrom the preliminary research into vaccine candidates, all the way through clinical trials, and to full-scale production.
Opinions expressed in this article are not necessarily those of bioMérieux.
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How Vaccines Are Tested
Understandably, people are often concerned to know how rigorously and extensively vaccines have been tested. This is especially true for new vaccines. This page aims to outline the process involved in developing and licensing a vaccine for use in the UK. The standard for testing and monitoring of vaccines is higher than it is for most other medicines, because they are one of the few medical treatments given to healthy people . This means that the level of acceptable risk is much lower than it might be for a cancer treatment, for example. It can take many years for a vaccine to pass through all the stages described below. In the case of the MenB vaccine, for example, it took 15 years from the first idea to the vaccine being licensed for use.
These are some of the stages a vaccine will have gone through before use:
The vaccine and the trials used to test it must meet the regulations laid down by the following authorities:
- ICH-GCP – international ethical and scientific quality standard for designing, conducting, recording and reporting trials that involve the participation of human subjects
- – Ethical principles for medical research involving human subjects
- EU Clinical Trials Directive – enshrined in UK law by the Medicines for Human Use Regulations
- RCPCH Guidelines for the ethical conduct of medical research involving children
- The Health and Safety Executive , for certain types of trials
Elsewhere
Tracking Side Effects Once A Vaccine Is Administered
The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System is a national vaccine safety surveillance program co-sponsored by the Food and Drug Administration and the CDC.
VAERS collects and analyzes information from reports of adverse events that occur after the administration of US licensed vaccines. Reports are welcome from all concerned individuals: patients, parents, healthcare providers, pharmacists, and vaccine manufacturers. To submit a report, use VAERS reporting pageexternal icon.
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