Are you willing to get the Covid vaccine when offered?
I think that my wife and I are pretty objective. We want to make the right decision. I think the average person would have NOT have the second series in our situation. We were hoping that it was either a coincidence or something specific to Moderna. And St. Ward is right that women have experienced menstrual irregularities after COVID itself. We rationalized the crap out of the situation before she decided to get the second series, this time with Pfizer.
But with the same reaction, severe life-altering symptoms, a second time with a different vaccine? It’s always cost benefit analysis, and in the particular situation the cost is too high. She doesn’t regret getting the complete series, it seemed like the right thing to do. But at this point, it’s simply the wrong clinical decision. We still recommend vaccination in adults to our patients because we acknowledge that this was likely not a common severe reaction.
But this needs to be studied. Not to scare people away from being vaccinated but to hopefully help determine if there is a subset of the population that are prone to these reactions and hopefully develop other vaccine options. My wife would like an option in the future that didn’t provoke significant health concerns.
To this, I have absolutely no objection. I never get sick from a flu shot, and don't have any hesitation in getting my flu shot every year. My cost-benefit analysis on the flu shot is a half-second needle prick in exchange for avoiding the flu, which I've had a pretty bad experience with in the past. It's an easy decision.
But if there's another booster for COVID coming, I really don't look forward to it. Both the second Moderna shot and my Moderna booster made me really sick. There's definitely much more cost for me in the cost-benefit analysis, and so I get where you're coming from.
I think it's completely reasonable to expect a vaccine to not make you feel terrible. Otherwise, at this point, with the apparent lack of severity of Omicron, you're just scheduling when you're going to feel sick, rather than avoiding sickness. I would probably still get another booster as recommended, but it's not a choice I would enjoy making.
My only real objection to your posting lately is that you do seem to let your personal experience cloud your discussion on this topic, and seem to speak regularly from a position of authority against the prevailing recommendations of experts in the field, which may lead others here to make health choices that are inconsistent with established scientific consensus. Yes, you give cursory vaccine endorsements, but on the whole, you appear to be significantly more hesitant than most in the healthcare field. The medscape poll you offered really seemed more like evidence of confirmation bias than research, and you used it to support a rather dubious claim that 30% of doctors weren't vaccinating their children.
I know you're a doctor, but we all have bias.