[ExI] COVID booster shot question for Rafal

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Sat, Feb 5, 2022 at 9:20 AM Hermes Trismegistus via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> Three days ago my dad and I received our JNJ COVID booster shots. I grew
> horribly sick from the so called “minor” side effects. My dad faired
> better, but still felt quite sick a few hours after getting vaccinated. He
> was concerned and got tested for COVID. The tested turned up positive. I
> soon decided to get tested as well, but I turned up negative. My dad before
> this never had symptoms that warranted a test. What is the best
> interpretation of this situation?
>

### Vaccinations, including booster shots of Covid vaccines, very often
produce a minor systemic inflammatory reaction which may vary in intensity
based on various individual and hard to predict factors, so the reactions
you and your father had are both very common and not very concerning.

Regarding the positive Covid test, it may have been a false positive (there
were some batches of home antigen tests that had this problem) or, much
more likely, an asymptomatic or oligosymptomatic Covid infection that
coincided with the booster shots. Your father probably contracted the
Omicron variant sometime in the past two weeks and was still shedding the
antigen when he got the booster, the booster made him feel sick (sicker
than the actual virus), he got tested and so detected the pre-existing
infection.

The situation may be different in China, where (not high-quality knowledge,
just hearsay) some vaccines use a whole inactivated virus and may actually
cause a positive Covid test for 48 hours after vaccination. This should not
apply to your father though.

Rafal
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20220206/ec203e9c/attachment.htm>