I got the Pfizer jab. The next day, I felt like I've been hit in the arm with a sledge hammer. It was soreness, not pain, and it lasted a day. I felt fine otherwise. Don't know if it was the vaccine or the injection technique.
My wife got the AstraZeneca jab. She felt "frail" in the evening after her shot and went to bed early. Felt fine the next day.
A few comments:
1. You can minimize soreness at the injection location. If it’s your arm, have the jab placed in your dominant one. This helps to dissipate the injected volume, which lessens local discomfort. It also helps to work your deltoids by moving your upper arms from your side up to your shoulders (‘chicken flaps’), let’s say 10 times every half hour for several hours. You’ll still feel the jab, but it won’t be nearly as annoying if you notice it at all. Secondary effects like fever, chills, tiredness, general malaise etc. are due to your immune system, and tend to last no more than a day. They also tend to be more pronounced after the second dose.
2. While two doses is a vaccination ‘standard’ (ideally making contact with the actual pathogen the 3rd exposure), the second dose of a particular vaccine may not boost your immune system much beyond what the first achieved. That’s why the J&J vaccine (developed by Janssen Pharma in the Netherlands) only uses one dose, and the Pfizer vaccine (developed by BioNTech in Germany) uses two. Similarly, while the interval between dose 1 and 2 usually is several weeks, it may be longer, as is now practiced in the UK. There are indications that this may be even more effective than shorter intervals, although this depends on both the vaccine and the actual duration of the interval.
3. The percentage vaccine effectiveness you hear about usually refers to the chance of NOT getting MILD disease. The chance of NOT getting more severe disease, hospitalization or death is increasingly larger, and runs from about 80% for no severe disease to about 100% for no death (J&J; Pfizer & Moderna numbers are somewhat higher). Bottom line: take
any vaccine that’s available to you, as soon as you’re eligible.
4. Variants only develop when the disease is actively going around, be it endemic or pandemic. As soon as that stops, so does the occurrence of variants. That’s another reason (beyond protecting people) why it’s important to stop the disease’s rampage ASAP, a.o. by maintaining masking and social distancing, and avoiding crowds, particularly indoors. Because we don’t yet know if vaccinated people can harbor and spread virus, this will be necessary for everyone, vaccinated or not, until ‘herd immunity’ levels are achieved, usually beyond 70% of the population. Even so, for the foreseeable future expect periodic (re)vaccination as with the flu.
