Everyone is different," adds Richard Watkins, MD, infectious disease physician and professor of internal medicine at the Northeast Ohio Medical University. "So just because you have no symptoms after the vaccine doesn't mean there is a problem," he tells Health.
Though it's often overlooked, the evidence suggests this too. "In all of the vaccine studies, at least 20% of people felt nothing post-vaccination and most side effects were fairly insignificant, such as injection site pain," Lewis S. Nelson, MD, professor and chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine, and director of the Division of Medical Toxicology at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, tells Health.
That goes for both clinical trials and real world situations (cough, me, cough). In the Pfizer vaccine trials, 77.4% of people reported at least one systemic reaction— that means nearly 1 out of every 4 patients didn't experience those side effects at all.
Slightly more people felt systemic reactions after a second Moderna shot—81.9%—but that still means about 1 out of every 5 patients felt fine.
The rates for Johnson & Johnson's vaccine were even better:
Though reactions were broken up by age groups, only 45.3% of people over 60 years old felt any systemic side effects, while 61.5% of people ages 18 to 59 did.
And that's from the same data that found those vaccines to be effective at preventing not only severe disease in clinical trials, but also hospitalization and death from COVID-19.