What If the Covid Vaccine Does Have Side Effects For Some People?

Michel Goldman is an immunologist and lifelong vaccine advocate. While dealing with a cancer diagnosis last year, he took a COVID vaccine himself as protection, and promptly started feeling worse. He suspected that a side effect of the mRNA vaccine might be interacting with his specific type of lymphoma cancer, but he was worried about the possibilities of going public with his experience.

As any scientist would, he first studied his results. After confirming, he felt a duty to publish a paper about it. He described spending hours carefully describing the vaccine “as possibly ‘inducing’ the ‘progression’ of his cancer, rather than ‘causing’ it to surface.” As he later recalled, “I’ve never spent so much time on details in a paper.” Predictably, anti-vaccine activists found his paper and started circulating it. In a black-or-white world, his experience offered ammunition for deniers to elevate their unscientific beliefs that the COVID vaccine was evil.

Reading his story (coincidentally, the day before getting my own COVID booster shot), I came to a different conclusion. Goldman's experience and his courage in sharing it show that it is possible for a treatment to simultaneously be life-saving for most people and also have adverse side effects for a small minority of people. This isn't a failure of medicine, it is a reality of science. Sadly, this type of nuance is quickly lost in the headlines.