Should a person who has had side effects after the first dose be afraid of the second injection?

Vaccination leads to its share of undesirable cases. While some people do without any symptoms, others will experience side effects that are quite normal but they would have been okay without. Flu symptoms, pain in the arm or in the joints or even vomiting … Vaccinees who suffered after the first dose obviously already think about what to expect during the second injection. Should they fear that the same effects will recur?

Eric Muraille, biologist and immunologist at ULB, admits that the documentation is lacking on this subject but he wants to be rather optimistic.

“I could answer you for conventional adjuvanted vaccines, that is to say the most classic vaccines that have been given over the past 20 years”, explains the specialist. “For these vaccines, in general, the inflammation is adjuvant-related. And in general, the second dose contains less adjuvants. So for these vaccines, the side effects in the second dose are clearly. less, or even completely non-existent. In the case of Covid vaccines on the other hand, I do not know and when I read the papers on clinical studies, they concerned all the side effects related to the first injection. I don’t remember having seen any on the second injection, or else it escaped me. But in any case I saw nothing in the literature that said that with these vaccines, there was a risk more important effects during the second dose. After that I may not have read all the documentation on this subject, and we may still lack hindsight, but if we had seen a greater effect during the second dose, I think it would have been widely communicated by now. So that can be ruled out. “