UCLA nursing professor shares her experience as a subject in COVID-19 vaccine trial
In August, Kristen Choi, a UCLA assistant professor of nursing, thought about how important it would be to participate in the testing of one of the new COVID-19 vaccines. So she stepped out of her usual role of conducting research and volunteered to become a study subject.Choi describes her experience as a participant in the trial for a vaccine being developed by Pfizer and BioNTechin a perspective published in JAMA Internal Medicine. (The vaccine received emergency use authorization in the U.K. on Dec. 2 and health care workers there began administering it today.)Although she experienced about a day ’s worth of difficult symptoms, Choi said her experience highlights the fact that health care professionals will need to prepare their patients to understand how the vaccine works — and that it is safe, despite the side effects.“The adverse effects of the vaccine — even if, at worst, they all happen at once — are transient and a normal sign of reactogenicity signaling an effective immune response,” Choi writes. “Clinicians will need to be prepared to discuss with patients why they should trust the vaccine and tha t its adverse effects could look a lot like COVID-19. They will need to explain that fatigue, headache, chills, muscle pain, and fever are normal, reactogenic immune responses and a sign that the vaccine is working, despite the unfortunate similarities with the disease’s symptoms.”The vaccine being tested, BNT162b2, requires two injections. Because the ...
Source: UCLA Newsroom: Health Sciences - Category: Universities & Medical Training Source Type: news
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