Adverse events after BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 vaccination in health care workers and medical students in Japan

Abstract

To control the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the promotion of vaccination is important. However, adverse reactions following vaccination remain a concern. To investigate adverse events in the vaccinated Japanese population, we conducted a survey-based study among health care workers, including medical doctors and nurses; other medical staff; and medical university faculty, staff, and students in a single medical school and affiliated hospital in Japan. In addition, we analyzed the association of different adverse events with individual factors (e.g., age, sex) by performing network analysis. While young age and female sex are often considered risk factors for more severe adverse events, the regression models showed neither age nor sex was associated with local injection-site reactions after the second dose in this study. In contrast to local reactions, systemic adverse events were associated with young age and female sex. However, myalgia was unique in that it was not associated with younger age even though the network analysis showed that myalgia was consistently related to arthralgia and belonged to the group of systemic events after both the first and second vaccine doses. Further study is needed to ensure safe and effective vaccination to aid in controlling the COVID-19 pandemic.

Keywords: Adverse event; COVID-19; Vaccination; mRNA vaccine.

Fig. 1

The networks after the first and second doses of BNT162b2. Each circle (node) represents an adverse event. The number given near a circle represents the count of observed events, and within the parenthesis is its fraction in the total count of vaccinated persons for each dose. In networks of events after the first dose (A) and after the second dose (B), there were 3 common clusters of adverse events: (1) fatigue, headache, fever, myalgia, chills and arthralgia; (2) local swelling, local redness and local itching; and (3) abdominal pain and diarrhea. For the other events, there were inconsistencies among community distributions between the two networks, possibly due to the lack of observations, and there was also low strength of the nodes in the two networks (C). Ab; abdominal pain, Ar; arthralgia, Ch; chills, Di; diarrhea, Fa; fatigue, Fe; fever, Fl; facial flushing, He; headache, It; local itching, Ly; lymphadenopathy, My; myalgia, Na; nausea/vomiting, Pa; local pain, Ph; pharyngeal pain/irritation, Re; local redness, Sw; local swelling.