People who have recovered from COVID-19 have a higher risk of adverse events after vaccination, according to a new study.
Health care workers who had post-infection immunity reported more adverse events after receipt of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine than those without natural immunity, researchers in England said.
Rachael Raw of Newcastle University’s School of Medicine and Health and her co-authors said the study revealed a “significant association” between natural immunity and one or more moderate/severe adverse events after doses one, two, and three of Pfizer’s vaccine.
Moderate/severe adverse events include diarrhea, fatigue, and fever.
Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, said he found the reported adverse events “trivial.”
“The type of adverse events that they report are trivial, and I would not call those adverse events but expected side effects like fever, headache achiness, which are very common after vaccination. Fortunately, those side effects last no more than 12 or 24 hours and are easily treatable with Tylenol,” Klausner, a former U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention medical officer, who wasn’t involved in the research, told The Epoch Times via email.
“The study has no clinical or public health significance and is not surprising. The study verifies that people’s immune systems are working as expected.”
Dr. Peter McCullough, chief scientific officer of The Wellness Company, disagreed.
More on Research
The UK researchers analyzed surveys completed by health care workers who work at hospitals in northeast England for the retrospective, observational study.Workers reported when they received a Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine booster dose and an influenza vaccine dose.
One of the aims was to find out whether concomitant influenza and COVID-19 vaccination enhanced adverse events. Researchers also analyzed whether prior COVID-19 infection led to worse adverse events.
About a third of the 534 workers who responded had recovered from COVID-19, and 92 percent received an influenza vaccine in addition to a Pfizer booster, which comes after a primary series because the vaccines have performed worse and worse against newer COVID-19 variants.
Those with prior COVID-19 were more likely to report experiencing one or more of almost all of the adverse events listed, including pain, swelling, fever, headache, and stiff joints. Nausea and vomiting was the only adverse event more common among those with prior COVID-19.
While, overall, the frequency of adverse events was reduced compared with after doses one and two, the study results show “the effect of prior COVID-19 on vaccine-associated AEs [adverse events], was again carried over to the third/booster BNT162b2/Pfizer dose in terms of increased AEs,” the researchers said.
They also found no signs of more adverse events or worse adverse events among workers who received an influenza vaccine within seven days of a COVID-19 booster.
Previous Research
Previous studies have found a higher risk of adverse events among the naturally immune, who many papers have found are better protected against COVID-19 than the vaccinated.Raw and other UK researchers have contributed to two of these studies.
The higher risk is likely driven by how the immune systems of the recovered are already primed to protect against COVID-19, according to Raw and her co-authors.
