Let’s take another look at the risks associated with sars-cov-2 infection versus the risk of covid-19 vaccination! At this point in time, the rhetoric should be that you will either get the shot or you will get the virus. It’s one or the other.
This article published in NEJM last week contains a comprehensive data set from the largest healthcare organization in Israel looking at adverse event risk in both vaccinated and infected individuals. Each person in the study was matched with a someone in the control group of similar demographics (age, comorbidity, etc.) in order to reduce bias. 884,828 individuals were matched in the vaccinated cohort and 173,106 individuals were matched in the infected cohort.
Of the 11 adverse events identified through reporting channels and chosen for the study, 8 of them were more common with viral infection than with vaccination, and 1 was equally common between groups.
The 2 that were more associated with vaccination were lymphadenopathy (temporary swelling of the lymph nodes from the immune response/reactogenicity) and herpes zoster infection (reactivating of latent chickenpox virus leading to shingles).