Hacker News Reader

Comment by erickhill | Hacker News Reader

I'm the only person I know that had an adverse reaction to my 2nd dose (Moderna). About 2 weeks after the shot I had 2 weeks of 1-2 degree daily fevers and fatigue with no other symptoms. My docs made me take 2 separate covid tests across that time - both were negative. During the end of the fevers I developed tinnitus in one ear.

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%.

View on HN

I also experienced tinnitus about two days after the second Pfizer dose. I had always had very mild tinnitus, noticeable only with specific attention in quiet rooms, and this was a clear increase that was noticeable in normal situations. I also had sensations of ear pressure and "fullness".

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.

In my case it was an undiagnosed long dormant bacterial tick borne infection that periodically became active and became worse the last couple of years. Subsequent treatment resulted in a heavy spike of symptoms i had long forgotten I once had years ago or accepted as the "normal" state. Of almost all of those symptoms I was unaware they might be somehow connected, one of them being Tinnitus in the right ear. There are probably lots of low level infections that cause no to only mild symptoms for years. My first BioNtech/Pfizer shot also triggered it again and some other funny symptoms that lasted for more than three weeks. Second shot will be next week.

Next time try Flonase up the nose, much less invasive than a shot into the middle ear.

> However, many people have also reported permanent hearing loss and tinnitus after contracting COVID

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.

There’s a third choice, which is not getting the vaccine because you already have natural resistance to COVID, such as through a previous infection with COVID. In this case, a vaccine could introduce unnecessary risk.

That’s the second choice. You’re just later on after catching COVID

It’s not the second choice though, since the initial state is different, and thus so are the risks and rewards of getting the vaccine.

What I'm still curious about is re: the risks of the naturally immune taking the vaccine. If they're immune, wouldn't they have fast deployment of antibodies to the vaccine-induced creation of the s-protein? Then surely it wouldn't be any greater risk than catching covid again, right? Meaning both situations (getting vaxx or getting covid again) would likely result in mild or no reaction (presuming an otherwise healthy risk profile). What am I missing?

One very small (but real) risk of the RNA vaccines is that it is quite difficult to dose the s-protein production. The amount of cellular uptake of the lipids envelopes, efficiency of ribosomes and many other factors play a role. The vaccine RNA is optimized to promote transcription. Someone who's cells are naturally happen to be great at transcription may create a lot more s-protein than someone else.

Too much s-protein can provoke a higher than optimal immune response which can also be dangerous.

Ok. I guess my question was: would it be safer for an otherwise healthy person that had covid and recovered to face covid again or to get the vaccine? And I guess the answer is: "it depends" - chiefly on which produces a larger viral load. And that might depend on how much virus you get sneezed into the open wound you're getting stitched up by the roadside Guatemalan doctor skimping on mask costs whose been feeling a wee bit snotty that afternoon. Or whether your cells produce more than is necessary and you have a bad immune response.

My mom had a bad case of COVID (13 days in the ICU). It affected her hearing. She said the hearing in her left ear would just cut out almost completely, and then later come back but not as strong as before. She went for a hearing test and they verified she had some hearing loss. She also experienced a number of other side effects but she's thankfully mostly back to normal now. You may have dodged a bullet by getting the vaccine, but like you said there's really no way to know.

I got tinnitus in both ears after first dose of Pfizer (got a very strong reaction in general, was feeling sick and weak for about 3 days after first shot). Been hesitant about getting the second because I don't want it to get worse.

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.

One person I know got high fever, 102-103F, after first Pfizer shot. No side effects whatsoever after the second shot. So, it’s all over the place.

I caught covid in 2020. One of the strange effects was tinnitus in left ear. The strange thing is I started noticing the 'ringing' almost right at same time I dimly perceived I was getting sick, when things were still just at 'mild headache' level.

I wonder if this is the work of spike protein causing some physical damage?

One of the interesting mechanisms is that the spike proteins poke out of already infected cells and activate a calcium-ion channel which ultimately triggers infected cells to fuse together so you get these massive cells with 20 nuclei all producing more virus and fusing other cells.

It seems like this mostly targets reparatory cells, but it's probably not great for hearing/smell if something similar happens to those cells.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02039-y

You're not alone. Acute tinnitus (making it hard to sleep) is the most important symptom in a range of problems (many looking like allergy ones) my wife got at her second dose of Moderna. It's still here 2 months after the injection.

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'm the only person I know that had an adverse reaction to my 2nd dose (Moderna)

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.

Congratulations on pissing off every possible group with different parts of this comment. I upvoted you anyway.

In the age of lies telling the truth is a revolutionary act. We're most certainly being had, and a crisis is being put to a good use by the interested parties: politicians, businesses, banks/hedge funds, and plain ol' facebook/twitter mouth breathers who vie for popularity and likes. Adults have left the room decades ago, as far as I can tell, if there were any adults in the public sector in the first place.

Agreed: moral acts are received as evil. We are attempting to 'save our democracy' and 'protect everyone' and that always only ends in one place: totalitarianism. The paradox of sustaining safety/risk is where we need to sit. But the coordination (blind and ideological; I don't think any of it is evil) of media wanting clicks, politicians being paid means we all serve The Economy. Thank you for your comments!

> 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")

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_...

I also developed Tinnitus after the J&J shot. Both ears. The ringing was on and off for the first few weeks after the vaccine shot but at about 4-5 weeks was a full fledged in both ears. Was so loud at first I couldn't focus on anything because of the anxiety. I'm either used to it now or it's quieted down enough that I can at least get through my day. An ENT didn't help me out besides prescribing something that's typically used for insomniacs so that I can sleep at night.

> About 2 weeks after the shot I had 2 weeks of 1-2 degree daily fevers and fatigue with no other symptoms. My docs made me take 2 separate covid tests across that time - both were negative.

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.

I was stiff in my right leg the day after being vaccinated with AstraZeneca. I could hardly walk, although the effects wore off during the day.

Many people I know felt rotten for the twenty-four hours after the 2nd Moderna dose, and I was one of them.

That's interesting, my buddy got tinnitus from the J&J shot.

Re being ill after being vaxxed - the vaccine doesn't stop you getting it, it reduces the risk of you dying from it. Likely, if they were really badly ill when vaxxed then they would have needed medical help, could have died.

To be clear, it also reduces your risk of infection.

It reduces your risk of infection taking hold, rather than being cleared fast by exposure to the pre-primed immune response ready and waiting.

macroscopically that can look like prevention of infection.

Would one know to get tested if they didn't have symptoms?

Increasingly nominally. Right now, the protection is about 50%. I expect it will continue to fall as the virus evolves.

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.

So what you’re saying is: it reduces your risk of infection? :)

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.

It doesn't preclude the need to mask up around vaxed folks either. Delta is spreading in part because vaxed folks stopped taking precautions, trusting in vaccines. That's not good for anyone. Vaxed folks won't get severe cases, but the jury is still out on long COVID. It also applies strong evolutionary pressure to vaccine-jumping mutations.

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).

Sure, fair point.

Nevertheless, vaccines do significantly still reduce your risk of infection. Agreed on the rest.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com