Coronavirus vaccine myths: Is the Covid vaccine safe?

Earlier this month, Health Secretary Jeane Freeman urged Scots to ignore coronavirus jag scare stories as new research shows anti-vaccine messages are rife on social media. 

Findings also showed that one-third of people have seen anti-Covid vaccine messages, it has emerged, with Facebook the main source.

Scotland's Health Secretary has now appealed to the public to ignore the misinformation as work continues to roll out the jag to the most vulnerable groups.

We spoke to Dr Georgia Perona-Wright, who is a senior lecturer in Immunology at the University of Glasgow, to debunk myths and conspiracies around the Covid-19 vaccine.

Here's what Dr Perona-Wright said:

Q1. The vaccine is not safe because it was rushed

Progress on the vaccine this year has been really impressive, but, while it has been fast, it hasn’t been rushed. All of the safety checks and approval steps that are required for any other new drug or vaccine have been completed for the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine too, and it has passed those checks.

There are a couple of reasons why progress on the vaccines has been so fast this year. The Covid-19 vaccines are variations on vaccine systems that were designed for previous infections, like Ebola, malaria and MERS – so the foundations were already built for these vaccines even before Covid-19 began to spread.

We only had to adapt the systems to fit the coronavirus, once we knew its particular characteristics. Also, the global pandemic meant that a vaccine was needed urgently by all countries, so the incentive for design and production was unusually strong. 

Very many researchers across the world stopped their previous work and focused entirely on coronavirus. Normally, before researchers start their work, we have to apply for grants for each project, a process that typically takes many months.

For Covid-19, financial investment from governments removed this need, giving us years of a head start. Data was also shared openly, and big, collaborative research teams were formed. Clinical trials for other new drugs were halted and the infrastructure supporting trials was turned over to coronavirus vaccine efforts.

Huge numbers of volunteers then stepped forward. The ongoing pandemic also meant that the virus was still common in the community, so vaccinated volunteers were exposed to the virus quickly and data on how effective the vaccines are could be collected within weeks.

43,000 people were included in the Phase III safety trial for the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine. Normally this number is only around 3,000, as volunteers are hard to find and infection is rare, so it is often hard to tell if a vaccine works.

The pandemic has, sadly, helped us here: the safety checks and the approval steps were all present and conducted as always, but there was less waiting time needed for enough data to be available so that these checks could be made.

Q2. We don’t know the long-term side effects of the vaccine

This is partly true, but only partly. We will continue to collect information about safety and how well the vaccines work, as they are rolled out, so we will know more in time.

However, both types of Covid-19 vaccine have been built using vaccine systems that have been used before, and we have long-term safety data from these previous studies.

For example, the mRNA vaccine technology used in the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine has been given to people since 2013 in a clinical trial of a new rabies vaccine. The safety data shows that some short-term effects of these vaccines are quite common, like a sore arm at the injection site, feeling tired, or having a fever. These are signs that your immune system is working and mounting a response, and that’s exactly what we want the vaccine to do.

Another part of this calculation of risk is that we don’t fully know what the long-term risks are of suffering from Covid-19. We know that some people (not all) experience debilitating symptoms for several months after infection.

We don’t yet know how long these symptoms will last, or whether there are other long-term consequences of Covid-19 too. These are also aspects of the pandemic that we need to study over time.

Q3. We’re being forced to take the vaccine - can we choose not to take it?

There are not currently any proposals to make vaccination mandatory. Vaccines are a collective, community decision, though, like mask-wearing and lockdown restrictions.

We do them to keep ourselves safe and also to protect others. Think both about yourself and about those around you, as you decide.

Q4. Do I need to wear a mask if I’ve been vaccinated?

Vaccinations, masks, physical distancing, hand washing and other public health measures are all strategies that together aim to end the pandemic and get us back into a society where masks are no longer needed.

The vaccines are shown to be 90 to 95% effective, meaning that 9 out of 10 people who are vaccinated will be protected against infection. Right now, the virus is still circulating in our communities and, if you are unlucky and in the 1 in 10 of people who are not fully protected after vaccination, then you are totally dependent on the protection offered by you and others continuing to wear masks and follow distancing guidelines.

When the proportion of people getting vaccinated increases and the amount of virus circulating in our communities falls, then it will be safe for all of us to stop wearing masks and ease up on the distancing measures.

So, for now, it is important to keep wearing masks.

Q5. Can I still get Covid-19 after receiving the vaccine and does getting it minimise the symptoms if I do catch the virus?

It takes a little while for the vaccine to work, and we know that two doses of the current vaccines give much better protection than only one dose. The data suggest that maximum protection is achieved about 10 days after your second shot, so there is a window of about three weeks after your first shot and then 10 days after your second shot when you are likely to still be vulnerable to infection.

Even after your second shot, we do not know for certain what the level of protection will be for you as an individual. We know that 90-95% of people are protected across the community, but we cannot guarantee that you will be in this 90%.

That’s why it’s important for all of us that take-up of the vaccine is high, so immunity across the community can also help to protect us all. If you are someone who does not develop a strong immune response after the vaccine, it is still possible that a smaller immune response will provide some limited protection, potentially reducing the amount of virus that will build up in your body if you are infected.

Smaller amounts of virus normally (not always, but normally) cause milder symptoms. So, while it is very likely that you will be protected by the vaccine, as with any vaccine, protection cannot be 100% guaranteed for every individual.

Q6. You’ll get ill after taking the vaccine

About 75% of participants in the vaccine safety trials reported a sore arm, a headache, mild fever, or some tiredness after receiving their jag, so we’re expecting some people to experience these symptoms as the vaccines are rolled out.

At most, these symptoms should only last for a couple of days. They are all signs of an active immune response, and they show that the vaccine is working. They are not signs that you have contracted Covid-19 from the vaccine. None of the current Covid-19 vaccines contain the whole virus.

Instead, they present your immune system with just one, isolated protein from the virus, the spike protein. This one component of the virus is not enough to cause an infection, in the same way that only a car bonnet won’t get you very far on a motorway drive. But the one component is very recognisable, and that spike protein is enough to train your immune response to recognise the full Covid-19 virus.

Q7. The flu vaccine protects you against Covid-19

The immune system is impressively specific in its responses, so it knows the difference between different viruses (such as the influenza viruses that cause flu, and the coronavirus that causes Covid-19).

Being vaccinated against one of these viruses protects you against that specific virus. The reason that it is really important to get your flu shot this year is not because the flu jab will protect you against Covid-19, but because getting both infections at once (Covid-19 and flu) might be too much for some people’s lungs to handle.

Q8. If everyone around me is immune, then I don't need to be vaccinated

This is technically true. It’s the idea of herd immunity. Viruses cannot live freely in the environment: they need a “host” – a person who provides a home for the virus. The virus lives in the cells of that host person, and it will multiply there, before using that person as a springboard to send new copies of itself out into the environment, hoping to find a new home and host for each of these new copies.

If the new copies can’t find a new home or host, they will die. If none of us people offer the virus a home, then the virus will lose its support base and eventually it will die out. One way to prevent the virus from finding a home is to use physical barriers, like masks, gloves and distance.

Another way is to be immune, either through vaccination or through being infected and surviving. If, as a community, we forbid the virus entry to any homes for long enough that it dies outside, then this can reduce the amount of virus circulating in the environment so much that it becomes unlikely that any of us will be exposed.

This reduction in circulation protects even those among us who cannot be vaccinated, or for whom the vaccine might not be as effective as in the rest of us (such as those on chemotherapy, or other immune-suppressing drugs). 

Q9. Natural immunity is healthier and more effective than vaccine-induced immunity

The vaccines are designed to stimulate the best type of immune response to be protective. For Covid-19, the current vaccines all stimulate an immune response against the Spike protein that sticks out on the surface of the virus.

Data shows that vaccinated people have higher levels of protective antibodies against the coronavirus than people who were naturally infected, and we expect that this means protection will last longer in the vaccinated people.

The vaccine is also much safer than natural infection. You might survive a natural infection and gain some immunity, but you might become seriously unwell or die, and you may infect many other people while that’s happening.

The deaths and disease caused by Covid-19 during the pandemic so far show that natural immunity is not always enough.

Q10. Why can we get a vaccine for Covid-19, but we can’t cure other diseases like HIV/AIDS or cancers?

The speed with which effective vaccines against Covid-19 were produced is impressive, and it shows the best of our science community. If the funding, resources and collaborative ethos demonstrated this year were applied to other diseases, we may well have effective vaccines for more of these too. 

That said, some viruses are more difficult to vaccinate against than others. For some viruses, we don't know enough about them; and for others, our best attempts at vaccines so far have not been effective. HIV is a really difficult virus to beat, as the virus replicates within our immune cells: it’s a brazen immune evasion strategy. It is painful to say, but we have been relatively lucky with the virus that causes Covid-19, as the prominent spike protein made a relatively easy target for effective vaccines.

Cancer is also an immensely difficult disease to treat, and one with a real and painful impact for many of us. There are new therapies that use our immune systems to reduce the size and spread of tumours, though, in a similar way that vaccines work for infections. This new group of drugs are called immunotherapies, or checkpoint inhibitors, and their inventors, James Allinson and Tasuko Honjo were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2018.

So there is hope for progress against cancer too, and we need research funding to continue in all diseases, not just Covid-19, to support advances like these too.

Who is getting the Covid vaccine first in Scotland?

First of all, the vaccine will be given to people who are delivering vaccinations, before moving on to over-85s and health and social care staff.

Care home residents in Scotland were able to receive the Pfizer Covid vaccine from December 14.

The interim guidance of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation gave this priority list: 

• Older adults in a care home and care home workers
• All those who are 80 years of age and over and health and social care workers
• All those who are 75 years of age and over
• All those who are 70 years of age and over and clinically extremely vulnerable individuals, excluding pregnant women and those under 18 years of age
• All those who are 65 years of age and over
• Adults aged 18 to 65 years in an at-risk group
• All those aged 60 and over
• All those aged 55 and over
• All those aged 50 and over