would lose staff due to side effects of vaccine vs Covid

The side effects of the Covid-19 vaccine, which range from fevers and chills to headaches and joint pain, could prevent some doctors and nurses from working, amid a national surge in hospitalizations.

Health systems are preparing to vaccinate key hospital personnel with injections from Pfizer and Moderna, which could begin shipping to the United States in a matter of weeks, pending emergency use authorizations.

Earlier this week, US federal advisers recommended that healthcare workers be immunized first, along with residents of long-term care facilities. For hospitals, that could pose major scheduling problems at a time when many are filling up. More than 100,000 Americans were hospitalized with the virus on Wednesday, according to data from the Covid Tracking Project.

Providers will need to remove medical personnel from work to vaccination rooms. And if side effects occur, they could lose key workers for a couple of days. To overcome this, some hospitals plan to stagger staff to keep units covered. Others are exploring giving workers vaccines at the end of their shifts, before they have a few days off.

Still, it’s hard to know what to expect without seeing complete data from Pfizer and Moderna’s large, late-stage clinical trials, said Paul Biddinger, vice president of emergency preparedness at Massachusetts General Hospital.

“It’s a little easier to create a model of how we should stagger employee vaccinations when we know how often (side effects) are happening and how severe,” says Biddinger. Plans could change when more robust data is available, he adds.

Although drug companies have yet to release the full results of their largest trials, previous test disclosures in recent press releases give some insight into their safety profiles.

Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech said on November 18 that no serious safety concerns were noted in their late-stage trial. Among the participants who received the two-dose vaccine regimen, 3.8 percent experienced fatigue and 2 percent had headaches. Older adults reported fewer mild adverse events. In a previous trial, the companies identified cases of mild to moderate fever.

Moderna, for her part, said on Nov. 16 that it had also failed to identify serious safety issues in its late-stage trial. Mild to moderate side effects included fatigue (9.7 percent), muscle or joint pain (5.2 percent), headache (4.5 percent), and injection site pain (2.7 percent). Side effects were more common after the second dose of the two-dose vaccine.

“We have been very reassured that we have not seen cases of things that we would not expect,” says Buddy Creech, director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Research Program that leads the trials of Covid-19 vaccines. “We see profiles of side effects that are common in other vaccines we use.”

Small proportion

Only a small proportion of those who receive coronavirus vaccines will face side effects, according to Creech, who also serves as principal investigator for Moderna and Johnson & Johnson.

Remember, “it’s not 100 percent of people who have a fever and chills,” Creech said Thursday during a media panel organized by the Infectious Disease Society of America, of which he is a member.

However, the potential that there could be side effects strong enough to put healthcare workers out of commission should be raised before the vaccination campaign begins, Creech said.

If the possibility is not communicated effectively, he added, hospitals could be left without staff. At the same time, medical workers should also be taught to distinguish between vaccine side effects and COVID-19 symptoms, given that they are highly exposed to the virus.

“We’re going to have to be somewhat strategic about who the vaccine is offered to, so we’re working with clinical leaders in those areas to make sure they scale their healthcare staff,” said Jeanmarie Mayer, chief of infection prevention at the University of Utah Health said Thursday at a news conference.

Hospitals generally plan to prioritize staff who work directly with coronavirus patients, as they are at the highest risk of contracting the disease on the job.

Mass General’s Biddinger fears that healthcare workers facing unexpected symptoms may panic into thinking that vaccines are flawed, sparking even more distrust among an already skeptical public.

“We’re trying to be very honest about what people should expect when they get the vaccine, but also to remind them that it is a good thing and that it actually means that the vaccine is helping us to be more immune,” he says.

Source: www.elfinanciero.com.mx

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