Covid vaccines. | Dado Ruvic


The side effects from the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine are usually mild to moderate and disappear within a few days, according to the European Medicines Agency, but some people are affected more than others.

"At first it was nothing, my arm hurt a little from the injection, but after a few hours I had aching muscles and chills, like when you get flu,” said María José García, who was vaccinated on Sunday. "I took a paracetamol because I felt hot, but I didn't have a fever, then when I woke up in the morning I couldn't move my arm and I had sciatica pain. I don't know if that was a coincidence or not, but it knocked me out.”

S. C. who's a freshman in Early Childhood Education was vaccinated on Saturday.

“At 8 o'clock I started to feel pretty bad and my temperature went up a lot," he says. "At 2 in the morning I woke up shaking and for the next hour I was sweating a lot. I took another and paracetamol and the next morning "I felt like i’d been hit by a truck.”

One in 10 people suffer symptoms such as headache, fatigue, aching muscles, chills, fever, joint pain and nausea after the injection.

"First of all you have to make sure you have the injection on the side you don’t sleep on," says Dr Javier Arranz, Spokesperson for the Regional Committee of Infectious Diseases.

"The second thing is, you must take paracetamol right after the vaccine, not before. The side effects usually occur a few hours later, so if you get vaccinated in the morning you might wake up with chills or flu and within the next 24 hours you may develop a fever,” he explains. "Side effects from AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Moderna are more frequent than from vaccines that have been around for decades, but they also clear up faster.”