Post-vac Syndrome After COVID-19 Vaccine: What Do We Know?
Tiredness and muscle pain: Every vaccination can have side effects, including the COVID-19 shot.
Tiredness and muscle pain: Every vaccination can have side effects, including the COVID-19 shot. But it is very difficult to diagnose the so-called post-vac syndrome. What do we know about vaccine damage?Like long COVID, post-vac syndrome is characterized by a wide variety of symptoms and clinical pictures like chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS/ME), migraines, muscle pain or cardiovascular diseases.
As multifaceted as the symptoms may be, they have one thing in common: They occur in those affected shortly after COVID vaccination.
Many people think they have post-vac syndrome because they got symptoms after their shot.
From the point of view of those affected, this is completely understandable, said Harald Prüss from Berlin's Charité hospital and the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE). But just because the symptoms occurred after the shot doesn't mean the shot caused them.
Prüss explained that post-vac syndrome "is totally overestimated in its dimension."
By October 31, 2022, almost 51,000 suspected cases of serious side effects after the COVID vaccination had been reported to the Paul Ehrlich Institute, the federal authority responsible for vaccines and medicines in Germany which has also written regular safety reports on the COVID vaccines. But experts like Prüss believe that the vast majority of these cases are due to something other than vaccine side effects.
Still, some injured parties want to sue the vaccine manufacturer BioNTech for alleged vaccine damage.
Vaccine side effects not unusual
It is not uncommon for vaccines to cause negative side effects for a small number of people. For example, studies show the H1N1 (swine flu) vaccine as well as the illness itself caused narcolepsy in a very small number of patients with similar, predictable genetic factors.
This response to the vaccine was easier to prove, said Prüss, because fewer people were actually catching H1N1 at the time. This wasn't the case with COVID, when millions of people were becoming infected — and vaccinated — more or less all at once.
How can post-vac syndrome be diagnosed?
Prüss sees many people who believe they are suffering from post-vac syndrome at the neurological post-COVID-19 consultations he conducts at the Charité's neurology clinic.
The first indication that a person's headache, fatigue or muscle weakness could actually have something to do with the vaccination is the time frame: If the symptoms appear a few days to weeks after the injection, there could be a connection.
But even then, post-vac syndrome is nearly impossible to prove, said the neurologist. "There is not a single biomarker that is widely accepted by science."
Such a biomarker would be, for example, a specific antibody that the body produces in response to the vaccination. Researchers discovered a special antibody in the blood of people who had developed inflammation of the heart muscle (myocarditis) after the vaccination. Myocarditis is considered a possible, rare side effect after vaccination with BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines.
Problems that occurred after the administration of the Astrazeneca vaccine offer another rare example of researchers being able to definitively conclude early on that the vaccine itself was the source of problems.
"It happened only seldom, but it was clear the vaccine had caused a very specific pattern of cerebral vein thrombosis that is otherwise not known, because it was associated with a very specific type of antibody that developed in response to a cross-reaction with the vaccine," Prüss said.
All of this is complicated by the fact that people across Germany (and the world) develop headaches, chronic fatigue syndrome and cardiovascular disease daily — and not just since the pandemic and the major vaccination campaigns.
"Every day, 30 new multiple sclerosis diagnoses are made in Germany alone," said Prüss. Attributing all of these things to vaccination without hard evidence would do little to help people. An incorrect diagnosis of post-vac syndrome could even hinder efforts to get patients with other diseases the therapy they actually need.
Additionally, one of the only ways to say with any degree of certainty that a person is suffering from post-vac syndrome rather than long COVID is if that person started experiencing symptoms shortly — weeks, not months — after getting the jab and had not been diagnosed with COVID at any point before. This can be difficult, because people may have had a COVID infection they did not know about.
Prüss and others who deal with the topic suspect that a real post-vac syndrome is probably very rare. The clinical pictures with which those affected come to the Charité consultation generally have other causes.
What happens in the bodies of post-vac patients?
There is currently little conclusive medical understanding of what exactly is happening when patients develop post-vac syndrome, but there are some theories.
President of the German Society of Immunology Dr. Christine Falk said the link between long COVID and post-vac syndrome could be a cross-reaction with the spike protein — which is created by a vaccine or is an element of it — and the infection itself.
There are some people who, after being infected or vaccinated, not only create the normal antibodies against the spike protein, but also experience a sort of cross reaction that produces antibodies that are inadvertently able to recognize endogenous structures — i.e. essential structures created by the body itself. These are called autoantibodies and they are present in many people with autoimmune diseases.
That could be why post-vac syndrome and long COVID have such similar symptoms.
With all of that said, Falk's idea is only a theory at this point, and much more research needs to be done on the topic.
Edited by: Carla Bleiker
(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Jun 13, 2023 06:30 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).