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Anyone experience hearing loss after Covid vaccination?

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Thanks to Jim Lewis for his rebuttal of nonsense with fact.

I have one minor quarrel with his posts and one humorous anecdote to relate as well as one suggestion for this thread. I’ll do the last first:

  1. It’s not yet known whether vaccination prevents infection. That’s actually hard to determine, because detecting the virus itself requires doing testing of a nasal swab or saliva for the presence of the virus itself. The vaccines have been shown to prevent symptomatic DISEASE in the vaccinated person, but we’ll accumulate evidence as to whether they prevent INFECTION by followup blood tests of the phase 3 trial participants to see if they’ve developed antibodies against viral proteins OTHER than the spike protein that almost all of the vaccines available at the moment are designed to deliver to our immune systems. There is now some population based evidence from Israel that the vaccines are actually preventing INFECTIONS and therefore reducing transmission as well, but one of the difficult problems with our response to this virus is that infections are often totally asymptomatic. Just because a person hasn’t been sick in the past year does NOT mean that said person has never had SARS CoVid-19 infection.

  2. All these anecdotes about whether or not one got knocked on one’s keister after the first or second dose make for a long thread, but they’re virtually useless in comparison to the proper accumulation of carefully recorded data in properly blinded and randomized clinical trials. When the results of the Pfizer Phase 3 trial were reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, I spoke a few times with one of the trial participants, who actually felt GOOD about waking up at 2 am the morning after her second injection with a temperature of 104°F, because that “meant” she’d received vaccine, not placebo. However, properly done clinical trials record EVERYTHING, and while fever and chills were dramatically more common among vaccine recipients than among placebo recipients, among the 40,000 trial participants only four had very high fevers in the seven days after the second injection, and two of those were in placebo recipients. Translation: just because something odd happened to YOU doesn’t mean that it was DEFINITELY caused by the vaccine.

  3. I spent forty years practicing nephrology, but as a young boy I was ABSOLUTELY terrified of needles. I have vivid memories of being told that I’d need to receive 3 injections of the Salk poliovirus vaccine, then learning that the world had lied to me because I’d actually need a fourth, and then (another LIE, this one rising to war crime severity) a FIFTH. One through 3 were given at school, but for some reason 4 & 5 by my family doc, who had to chase me around the room to administer it. I also had a younger sister, and I blamed HER for being 5 years younger for quite some time, because when SHE was due for the lethal injections, all she had to do was swallow a sugar cube (live, attenuated virus vaccine). Of course, there were some tragedies associated with that.

In summary, there’s an answer to the question of whether the mRNA vaccines can worsen hearing loss, but it cannot be inferred from a few dozen anecdotes. There’s actual EVIDENCE, and it’s recorded in the voluminous tables of the appendices in the randomized trials publications. I’m not claiming that people should “suck it up” and not report adverse occurrences, but establishment of causality isn’t based on anecdote. Famous example, the vaudeville joke (“I had a friend who ate carrots. They KILLED him!” question: “My god, that’s awful! What happened?” answer: “He stepped outside and got run over by a truck.”

One other aspect of the amazing success of the mRNA vaccines: their very success may limit how much we learn about how long vaccine-induced immunity lasts, or about any delayed or unexpected consequences of vaccination, because now that we know they’re 95% effective in preventing serious illness compared to placebo recipients in the trials, many trial participants are (probably justifiably) clamoring for the blinding to be lifted so that placebo recipients can be vaccinated. The difficulty with that, of course, is that 6 month, 12 month, and 2 year followup of vaccinated vs. unvaccinated trial participants is how we’ll learn for certain just low long the immunity lasts, and that won’t be possible if the “placebo” arm of a trial disappears. No one expected the vaccines to be SO effective, but in at least one of the trials, the disclosures that participants signed did include that possibility. Ethicists are struggling mightily with that question now.

I got my second Moderna vaccine about 2 weeks ago. I have not noticed any change in my hearing after either of the injections. I had some other very mild symptoms after both of the injections.

In reply to @jimrobertson

@jimrobertson said:

There is now some population based evidence from Israel that the vaccines are actually preventing INFECTIONS and therefore reducing transmission as well, but one of the difficult problems with our response to this virus is that infections are often totally asymptomatic.

~One in 20 people can still get a symptomatic COVID-19 case (defined as testing positive for virus and having at least one symptom typically associated with COVID infection). So ideally there shouldn’t be ~no masks until there are ~no cases. The 538 site has a long-winded, complicated discussion (like one of my posts!) of vaccination follow-up and efficacy but starts off with a story of a healthcare worker who was vaccinated, felt he was immune, and had a maskless family reunion with his wife and elderly parent. He got an asymptomatic case of COVID-19 and his wife and parent were worse off. He was presumably the cause as he’s a hospice worker for COVID-19 patients. [COVID-19 vaccines: So You Got Vaccinated … And Then You Got COVID. Now What? | FiveThirtyEight

There are a number of sites discussing in clearer detail than the 538.com site the meaning of 95% efficacy:

COVID-19 vaccines: What does 95% efficacy actually mean? | Live Science4

What Does 95% Effective Mean? Teaching the Math of Vaccine Efficacy - The New York Times (nytimes.com)2

As @jimrobertson raises in his 2nd post above, there is also the unsettled question of how long immunity lasts and how well the current vaccines are helpful as new variants continue to arise in the vast population of the unvaccinated world - a good reason to be as charitable as possible in helping the rest of the world get vaccinated, too, or 5 or 6 billion other people in unvaccinated areas will be helping to let the virus multiply like crazy and further evolve and potentially make our own vaccinations more useless …

Just for clarification: 95% efficacy doesn’t mean one in twenty vaccinated people are destined to get a mildly symptomatic case of Covid after being vaccinated. It means that those symptomatic cases will be twenty times more likely in non-vaccinated people than in vaccinated individuals. In the mRNA phase 3 trial of the Pfizer vaccine, placebo recipient were 20 times more likely to develop symptomatic Covid (162 of about 20,000) than were vaccinated individuals (8 of 20,000). What remains unknown is how many of the vaccinated individuals had totally asymptomatic infections, because to detect those as they happened, all 20,000 of each group would have needed to have daily nasal swabs PCR tests, which would have been a truly laborious undertaking. We’ll learn that information in retrospect by seeing how many of both groups developed (non-vaccine-related) antibodies against the virus during extended followup, but that information will become obscured if the placebo recipients are vaccinated in the upcoming months. And, if the vaccine is much less effective in preventing those asymptomatic infections than it is in preventing Covid DISEASE, those who are vaccinated now may still be dangerous to people with whom they come in close contact even though now themselves protected against sickness from the virus.

Edited
@jimrobertson said:

Just for clarification: 95% efficacy doesn’t mean one in twenty vaccinated people are destined to get a mildly symptomatic case of Covid after being vaccinated. It means that those symptomatic cases will be twenty times more likely in non-vaccinated people than in vaccinated individuals. In the mRNA phase 3 trial of the Pfizer vaccine, placebo recipient were 20 times more likely to develop symptomatic Covid (162 of about 20,000) than were vaccinated individuals (8 of 20,000).

@jim_lewis said:

~One in 20 people can still get a symptomatic COVID-19 case (defined as testing positive for virus and having at least one symptom typically associated with COVID infection). So ideally there shouldn’t be ~no masks until there are ~no cases.

AFAIK, I cited a RATE or a likelihood of getting a symptomatic infection, not an endpoint as to what % of the total population might get infected. There is a slight correction to the likelihood (rate) of getting infected in the early stages of vaccination/pandemic infection saturation before herd immunity sets in. I did not allow for the % of asymptomatic cases in the unvaccinated population. So with that allowance, vaccination can be said to reduce your chances by 1/26 of those infected of getting a SYMPTOMATIC COVID-19 infection out of those that might be infected in the total population. Here’s the reasoning.

I think for the study statistics that we’re dealing with and for the study to be meaningful, one has to assume, as the researchers undoubtedly did, that both the experimental vaccinated arm and the control unvaccinated arm of the field tests were populations ~equally exposed to coronavirus.

The numbers that you cite are because in both the experimental and control arms the vast majority of participants were probably never exposed to COVID - so just to be clear, getting vaccinated did not reduce the chance of getting COVID to only 0.04% - the incidence of COVID in the vaccinated experimental arm. The estimate of how many people can be infected but never develop any symptoms is ~24% (and ~35% of cases transmitted by others BEFORE they develop symptoms). 59% of COVID Cases Stem from Asymptomatic Spread (webmd.com) So ~75% of all people exposed and infected develop symptoms eventually. Since given enough time, without a vaccination program, ~everyone will be exposed to COVID and presumably infected***. So out of 100 people infected, 76 would show symptoms. Vaccination reduces those infected showing symptoms by 1/20. So if everyone were vaccinated and then exposed to COVID-19, only 3.8 people out of 100 infected would be symptomatic. That’s ~1 chance in 26 of showing symptoms if vaccinated and then infected.

The two assumptions here are that ~everyone is susceptible to an infection, asymptomatic or symptomatic, without vaccination and the observation that vaccination reduces the rate of symptomatic cases by a factor of 20. Two things that would alter the calculation is if less than 100% of the population can be infected because some individuals don’t have the type of cell receptor that the virus spike protein can attach to, for instance, or the fact that as 70% to 90% infection/vaccination of the population is approached, even the infection of non-vaccinated individuals will slow and they’ll be protected by herd immunity and lack of viral transmissibility, not their own degree of immunity.

So perhaps it’s more correct to say during the early stages of vaccination before herd immunity is approached, being vaccinated would reduce your chances(rate of) symptomatic infection to 1 in 26 of out of all people infected. AFAIK, most modeling presumed that close to 100% of the naïve population is susceptible to coronavirus infection and the vaccination results show, unless you want to write them off as defective vaccine injections, that the vaccine reduces but does not eliminate your chances of getting a symptomatic COVID-19 infection. The best news is that vaccination reduces the chances of having a very serious infection requiring hospitalization or a lethal infection by 5x more (by a factor of 1/100).

I didn’t claim anything about what vaccination means to the relative number of asymptomatic cases. It would seem likely that the proportion of asymptomatic cases increases amongst those vaccinated relative to symptomatic cases and that would lessen the impact of vaccination if a larger proportion of people are now asymptomatic but still capable of transmitting virus to others and passing it forward.

***Since antibodies to the common cold wear off with time over a period of many months to years and the human population has never seen this coronavirus, it’s reasonable to assume that ~everyone is susceptible to infection, asymptomatic or not. In initial antibody surveys in California during early stages of the pandemic, less than 5% of the population had neutralizing antibodies against the virus.

EDIT: WITHOUT VACCINATION, only another 7% more of the U.S. population would be expected to be exposed to COVID-19 in the coming 2021 year - that’s assuming wearing masks and social distancing continues on, which offers protections to people, whether vaccinated or not. 0.07 x 330 million (U.S. population) = 23.1 million cases if ~all exposed get infected. When will COVID-19 vaccines start to make a difference? | Live Science

Edited
@david3 said:

You owe it to yourself to hear what he says.

Greater than 500,000 COVID deaths in the U.S. in ~1 year with far more lockdowns, restrictions, distancing, masking than ever applied to seasonal flu says that Bhakdi doesn’t know what the H— he’s talking about. Especially since unrestricted healthy youthful folks are a vector to bring the disease to older or compromised or racial/ethnic groups more susceptible for various reasons. Linus Pauling was a two-time Nobel Prize winner and a towering scientist of the 20th century yet he was convinced that mega-doses of vitamin C are the answer to many health problems. Maybe this guy can aspire to be the Linus Pauling of COVID-19?

Anthony Fauci and the many infectious disease experts in the United States are the folks to listen to. Sorry…

Edit_Update: The German university that Dr. Bhakdi was associated with has disavowed itself of former faculty member Dr. Bhakdi’s views: Sucharit Bhakdi - Wikipedia1

Jim, I appreciate your perspective. But I believe you are wrong.
I wish you and Dr. Fauci all the best.
But I believe it is in my best interests to steer clear of his advice.
I won’t bother you any further with my opinions. (End of discussion.)

@david3 said:

(End of discussion.)

Well…your participation in it anyway. :slight_smile: May want to also be aware of your place in human social civil society. Some adhere to the in it for oneself idea. Others participate together all for the greater common good.

In reply to @david3

@david3 said:

But I believe you are wrong.

Unfortunately ‘beliefs’ aren’t worth squat under rigorous scientific and epidemiological study.

You might want to listen to what Jim and the good Dr Fauci have said; even if you don’t believe it will help you, perhaps you’ll do it for someone immune compromised in your community.

@artistofmysoul said:

All wisdom does not begin and end with you on this issue or any other.

If you think the wisdom is coming from me, that’s where you’ve got it wrong. It’s coming from a world of experts in America and Europe but it’s obviously being overlooked or not followed by a lot of people or we wouldn’t have 500,000 dead and counting in the U.S. I’m simply repeating what the experts say. Some people feel that they should be free to ignore expert advice if they don’t understand it or accept it but they do so not only at their own peril but at the peril of the populace in general since ignoring it helps the pandemic and death continue on.

Society has implemented No Smoking regulations and driver seat belt laws. It’ll be interesting to see in that regard where we’re heading with behavior that’s a public health hazard with a pandemic in progress.

A very famous incident in the time of slavery was the Zong Massacre, where a British slave ship had overstocked itself on captives for the Middle Voyage from Africa and was running short of water. To preserve the value of the majority of its captives, the slavers threw ~132 of their captives overboard ALIVE to have enough water for the rest to keep them in good shape to sell upon arriving in Jamaica. The calls now of some people that we must keep the economy running at all costs, that older people should be prepared to sacrifice themselves for the economy and the jobs of younger folks, somehow reminds me of the Zong Massacre (Melvyn Bragg’s guests on BBC4 mention the present pandemic in relation to the Zong Massacre in the program discussion):

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Zong Massacre3

Are we forever stuck with the big bold black-letter LIE as the title of this thread? Isn’t there a way to change it? How many people will contract Covid and spread it to others because of this false anti-vaxxer headline?
Many people on this forum just skim the headlines.

I just wrote Staff as follows:
“The big bold headline of this forum spreads an “anti-vaxxer” LIE which will deter many naive people from getting this vaccine, thus perpetuating the spread of this fatal disease!!! Can’t it be modified to something neutral?”

Think of it as click-bait then. A reader takes the bait only to read that it was a question and that subsequent posters were smacked down with their anti-social attitudes.
But all it would take is a single question mark at the end.

@z10user2 said:

Think of it as click-bait then. A reader takes the bait only to read that it was a question and that subsequent posters were smacked down with their anti-social attitudes.

That’s a good point, except that not everyone goes to the forum to read all the replies in a forum, whereas everyone is getting an email everyday that appears to announce this terrible one-liner:
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