Minor side effects can occur after vaccination with any of the licensed vaccines for use with the CCA virus (COVID-19). However, study data show that significantly more women than men report vaccine side effects, and most have more severe symptoms.
According to a study released in late February by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), data on reported side effects after vaccination showed significant gender differences.
The study looked at 13.7 million people in the United States who received the CCLV vaccine in the first month, and 6,994 people actually reported their experience of vaccine side effects through the CDC’s post-vaccination health checker, V-safe. Of these, 79.1% of women reported vaccine side effects, and it is definitely worth pointing out that women accounted for 61.2% of those who received the vaccine.
The study’s results are not unique; in February, another study published in JAMA by CDC researchers found that 19 people, all of them women, had severe and potentially Life-threatening anaphylactic reactions after receiving the Moderna vaccine. Forty-seven people, 44 of them women, had anaphylactic reactions after receiving the vaccine, which was jointly developed by Pfizer and Pfizer-BioNTech.
The cases were also described in a recent article published in The New York Times. Shelly Kendeffy, a 44-year-old medical technician at The Pennsylvania State University, shared that she and her colleagues – eight men and seven women – all received a second dose of the Modena CCLV vaccine and experienced very different reactions.
Six of the female vaccinees experienced body aches, chills and fatigue, and one woman experienced vomiting. However, among the male vaccinees, only four had very mild symptoms, and the remaining four had no symptoms at all.
The CDC says side effects are normal, and the CDC study, published in late February, found that the most commonly reported symptoms of vaccine side effects included headache (22.4%), fatigue (16.5%) and dizziness (16.5%). So why might women report more vaccine side effects than men? There is no definitive answer yet.
Amesh Adalja, PhD, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (USA), told health.com that it may be solely because women are more likely than men to to report their symptoms.
William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert and professor at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Tennessee, said women are more likely to report symptoms and that’s not the only reason. While the exact cause is not clear, he said women’s immune systems appear to be more active, while hormonal differences may also be at play, with estrogen “stimulating” the immune system.
“There are real differences in immune responses between men and women,” Dr. Schaffner added, “and the medical community has not done the kind of thorough research that we should have done.
“Men and women also metabolize drugs differently,” women’s health expert Jennifer Wider, PhD, told health.com, adding that clinical trials often don’t account for such differences and that women also have slightly higher antibody responses to vaccination than men.
The CDC study, conducted between Dec. 14, 2020, and Jan. 13, 2021, examined only the Pfizer and Modena vaccines because the Johnson & Johnson vaccine had not yet received an emergency use authorization at that Time.
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