Abstracto

Frequency of Undesirable Effects after COVID-19 Vaccination in Pakistani Population

Umar Farooq, Syed Yar Muhammad Shah, Muhammad Irshad Khan, Khalid Shahzad, Shoukat Ali, Alina Fakhar, Qaiser Ali, Rehman Bahadar, Naseer Ahmad

 

Background: Covid-19 is caused by SARS-CoV-2 which had its index case from Wuhan, China in December 2019 and rapidly took over the entire globe and was declared as a global pandemic. Due to this, millions of people succumbed to it and lost their lives. This not only had a massive toll on the healthcare system but also led to a huge setback to the economic infrastructure of not only developing but also developed countries. To reduce the risk of further outbreaks and to prevent the recession of economy Covid vaccine emerged as the greatest savior of mankind and multiple vaccines were developed by various companies all around the world in early 2020. About 11 vaccines were granted Emergency Use Listing by WHO. Governments all around the world started vaccination campaigns and billions of vaccine doses were administered globally including Pakistan. Although the vaccines were proven to be safe in clinical trials, in real world settings there were various adverse effects reported with the vaccines by many recipients along with immunity against the virus. The aim of our study was to determine the frequency of undesirable effects after vaccination.

Objectives: To determine the frequency of undesirable effects after covid-19 vaccination.

Materials and Methods

Study design: descriptive cross sectional prospective study 

Settings: ayub medical college Abbottabad, Pakistan.

Study duration: 8 months

Data collection and analysis: 113 subjects aged 18 years to 59 years of either gender who are partially or fully vaccinated against Covid-19 were included in the study. A structured questionnaire was developed for data collection after reviewing of literature. Students were approached in lecture halls and hostels and data was recorded after taking informed consent. Data was analyzed by using statistical package for social sciences SPSS Version 20.

Results: In this study the participants belonged to the age group 18 year to 59 years and mean age was 23.15 ± 5.6years among the students and faculty of Ayub Medical College. Out of the total 113 participants 85(75.2%) were males and 28(24.8%) females. Out of 85 male participants, 52 (61.17%) experienced undesirable effects after vaccination and 33(38.82%) didn’t have any of these effects. Out of 28 female participants, 12(42.85%) felt undesirable effects after vaccination while 16(57.14%) didn’t face any effects. The most common undesirable effect faced by the majority of the participants 46(22.7%) was fatigue. No significant association of undesirable effects was found with socio-demographic or other factors in the research.

Conclusion: The analysis showed that majority of the participants experienced undesirable effects after getting either first or second dose of Covid vaccination which mostly resolved in a day or two without use of any medication. There is still need to work on the vaccines to minimize their undesirable effects.