Eight days after receiving the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine, a male nurse in the United States was found to be Corona positive. Immediately after taking the vaccine, the nurse Matthew W. told a media house that he did not suffer from a side-effect save that his arm was sore for a day. But on Christmas Day, six days after the vaccination, he began to feel fatigued and developed ache in his muscles.
However, an infectious disease specialist based in San Diego, Christian Ramers, said that this symptom post-vaccination was not entirely unexpected. He said that the clinical trials done on the vaccine show that it takes about 10 to 14 days for an individual to start to develop protection from the vaccine. This is so because it takes a few weeks post-vaccination for the human body to develop immunity in the form of anti-bodies against the virus.
In the first dose, according to Ramers, it only gives somewhere around 50% immunity to the individual. Only after taking the second dose, one gets upto 95% immunity from the disease. That’s why it is strongly recommended that vaccine recipients return for a second shot.
It needs to be mentioned that the vaccination regime submitted by Pfizer and Bio-NTech jointly—the two companies which have developed the vaccine—specifies that the two doses of the vaccine are to be administered with a gap of 21 days in between them.
In spite of all this, it is unknown whether the vaccine will be able to prevent infection altogether.
