2021-04-19 General

Side effects

Bad news for anybody who enjoys erections: COVID can cause erectile dysfunction.

Vaccines

There are starting to be a few reports of inflammation of the heart in young people after getting an mRNA vaccine. This is very early, so it might be nothing… but it also might be something.


Aaaannnd this paper talks about thrombocytopenia (low platelets) after mRNA vax. The paper is actually from February, so doesn’t talk about the AZ issues, so I can’t tell if it’s the same mechanism or not.


This thread goes into a lay discussion of a paper (which was done basically by J&J) which says that J&J is different from AZ, really it is!!!! The paper points out all the ways which the chimp adenovirus in AZ is different from the human adenovirus in J&J and why that matters. I am not convinced, but see for yourself.


Then there’s this video (which references this paper from Denmark) which suggests that hitting a blood vessel during injection might be behind the AZ issues. Intramuscular injections drain into the lymph system, but if you miss and hit a blood vessel, it will drain into the circulatory system.

One thing vaccinators can do is “aspirate”, i.e. push the needle in, pull back slightly, and see if any blood came in. I noticed the vaccinator doing that for an 83 y/o friend of mine, but my spouse’s vaccinator did not do it. I told my vaccinator that I wanted him to aspirate, and he said that here they are trained to not aspirate because it makes the arm sorer, and that because of how the blood vessels run around the deltoid, it’s really hard to hit a blood vessel. (He humoured me, however, and aspirated.)


A paper from the UK says that patients with multiple myeloma mounted a weaker response to their first dose of either Pfizer or AZ, but that it was good enough. They also said that there wasn’t an obvious difference between the two vaccine types.

Treatments

Convalescent plasma appears to be not-useful.