I'm under the strong impression right now that the tinnitus will never go away. Thankfully mine is not a tone but a constant humming, like a dishwasher or refrigerator.
But yeah, something weird can occasionally occur with a very small % of the population either from the disease or the protection.
That being said one of my colleagues at work - fully vaxxed - was infected by an un-vaxxed family member at a family reunion. He passed it onto another fully vaxxed work colleague. Both were sick for about two weeks and one lost his taste of smell. That was months ago. He says it has returned but only by about 50%.
macroscopically that can look like prevention of infection.
50% is a lot from a public health perspective -- there's a huge difference in the exponent -- but not something you can rely on to keep yourself or your relatives safe.
I agree that it’s waning, and likely boosters will help, but it is far better (and safer) than doing nothing; just doesn’t preclude the need to mask up around unvaxed folks, etc.
Note: Before anyone jumps on the above statement, I'm not trying to imply anything else. Vaxed folks who don't take reasonable additional precautions ARE a major source of spread COVID19. That's not meant as a comparative statement (unvaxed folks are ALSO a major source of spread).
Nevertheless, vaccines do significantly still reduce your risk of infection. Agreed on the rest.
And this is one of the maddening things about finding causality in disease. It might have been a reaction to the vaccine. Or you might have picked up an entirely unrelated illness on the same day as getting vaccinated... Because, for example, you had to stand in line with a handful of people and sit in the same chair as, perhaps, a couple hundred more, all of whom could have had God-knows-what.
You probably didn't have COVID because two tests came back negative, but without knowing what else it could be, doctors don't know what test to try to find what you did have. Usually, if enough people report similar symptoms, the CDC would do outbreak follow-up with the testing site to see if something got brought in and spread widely.
Interesting to read that I'm not the only one with this reaction. It's been 5 months now so I also assume that its permanent.
I wonder if this is the work of spike protein causing some physical damage?
It seems like this mostly targets reparatory cells, but it's probably not great for hearing/smell if something similar happens to those cells.
Went to see an ENT who basically said "Yeah, maybe the vaccine, weird, but we know nothing here." and offered no solution. I had a hearing test which showed a slight decrease in sensitivity at low frequencies, but still in the clinical range for "normal hearing", so there wasn't really much to be done.
In severe cases or those involving clear hearing loss, most people seem to think that oral steroids or steroid injections directly into the middle ear would be effective at reversing whatever inflammatory process is occurring and avoid long-term damage. Steroids have their own side effects, and to be effective, need to given as soon as possible. I had waited a bit to make the ENT appointment and didn't feel like my case was severe enough to ask for this.
Now two months later the ear sensations have gone away and the tinnitus is back to the mild level I experienced previously. But it was an unpleasant experience that I do not wish to repeat. I will probably avoid the booster if possible.
However, many people have also reported permanent hearing loss and tinnitus after contracting COVID. For all I know, getting the vaccine may have saved me from much more serious and long-lasting symptoms that would have come with an actual COVID infection. No way to know unfortunately.
Goddamn biology. Back to coding now.
Thanks for pointing this out. It's definitely sad that people are having side effects to the vaccine, but most of the discussion about it seems to be implicitly asserting that the choice was either to get the vaccine, or go on without it while staying healthy indefinitely. Obviously that's not the case, the choice is to get the vaccine or eventually catch Covid unvaccinated and roll the dice with what might happen in that case, which by all indications is much more likely to lead to serious side effects than the vaccine.
Too much s-protein can provoke a higher than optimal immune response which can also be dangerous.
There are a few articles on the links between those vaccines and tinnitus but right now it doesn't look like a deeply studied problem, nor even one physicians are interested into.
I don't _personally_ know anyone who died from COVID. Yet people are clearly dying from it. They are also sometimes getting adverse reactions to vaccines, up to and including death. Personal anecdotes are not data, however, and it's annoying and alarming that COVID deaths are inflated (got run over by a bus, but had COVID that only shows up at 40 PCR cycles? you died "with covid"), whereas vaccine adverse effects are carefully swept under the rug. It is also extremely counterproductive if the goal is to persuade people to get vaccinated, and it demolishes what little trust in the authorities people still had.
I wish responsible adults, and not political operatives (or former / future Big Pharma corporate board members), ran our health authorities such as the FDA and the CDC.
PS: I'm vaccinated, obviously, since I'm not an idiot.
This is false and an annoyingly persistent myth. A death is only included in COVID statistics if it was one of the four contributing causes of death. If someone died from trauma such as a vehicle accident, but is found to have had COVID, that's not recognised as a contributing factor but merely incidental.
The WHO guidelines are very clear on this. [0]
[0] https://www.who.int/classifications/icd/Guidelines_Cause_of_...
Unfortunately while the general idea of cytokine storms had been floating around for quite a while, it wasn't named until 1993, and wasn't really studied as its own thing until 2002/2003. No chance they would have been able to do anything about it in 1918.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-did-1918-flu-kill...
https://ec.europa.eu/research-and-innovation/en/horizon-maga...
https://vaers.hhs.gov/reportevent.html
Patients can report adverse events. Even suspected adverse events can/should be reported. This is how rare side effects can be identified and evaluated. A single report of tinnitus is unlikely to be flagged, but 10,000 reports? Absolutely.
I had a positive PCR test during the first set of symptoms FWIW.
When vaccines are concerned, the skeptics have been censored and ostracized (generally speaking, not on HN). Therefore, whatever results are claimed to be science are not such, or at least not yet. Relying on anecdotes is the only recourse that we have to restore some semblance of scientific process.
I live in China, where we do that. You re welcome to join, something tells me you'll like it here.