PScientist

There seems to be a clear trend that women report worse vaccine side effects than men. (I would link to one of many news articles about this, but not allowed to post links yet.) Anecdotally, that was the case when I compared notes with a few of my female colleagues who were vaccinated with the same lot of vaccine on the same day at an employer-sponsored clinic.

yerffej201

I had a high fever and chills after my first shot of Pfizer. According to the Pfizer EUA, 3.7% of people get a fever after their first shot. For flights to/from countries that have temp checks, I definitely would have failed.

DenverBrian

Yeah, I probably should have said "few severe side effects."

catocony

That's totally accurate. End of the day, you might feel like crap for a day or so, you might feel totally fine, you might be somewhere in between. However, nothing that should prevent you from traveling a few days afterwards. Of course, at this point in time, you should just wait the two weeks and pretty much be bulletproof from even mild symptoms if you somehow did come down with COVID after vaccination.

Jzo

I'm sorry, but this seems hard to believe. You're a professor, and you're asking people here? You don't have physicians or biologists on your campus whom you can ask?

If you are rational, what should scare you more than anything else is getting COVID-19. Flying on a plane without being vaccinated should scare you.

Get vaccinated! BTW, I'm a retired biology professor initially trained in virology.

Jzo

That's simply not correct. Inactivated means whole virus, typically fixed with formaldehyde or paraformaldehyde; it's a balancing act between ensuring that all the virus has been inactivated without destroying its antigenicity. The J&J vaccine can be described as a "helper-dependent" or "replication-deficient" virus, but not as inactivated. It requires adenoviral genes to replicate that are provided in the reactor by the cells in which the vaccine was grown. Those genes were transfected into the cells.

The great thing about the mRNA vaccines is that we can revel in feeling sick after them. Those effects really shouldn't be thought of as side effects.

And if I was in the OP's shoes, I would enjoy feeling like crap while flying, because I'd know that the vaccine was working. That general state makes one more resistant to infection even before there is specific immunity.

That is correct, but "traditional" doesn't need scare quotes.

BenA

Sorry, but this is completely wrong. J&J is not inactivated virus - uses an active, custom-engineered adenovirus that has the genetic material for COVID spike proteins inserted into it. It's broadly the same approach as mRNA vaccines, it just uses a different viral vector to deliver the genetic material rather than providing it directly. (AstraZeneca and Sputnik V use the same approach.)

The only inactivated virus vaccines currently in use are from China and India - Sinovac, Sinopharm and Bharat Biotech.

cmd320

Whatever J&J came up with it seems to have been about as successful as Boeing’s result with the 737MAX. May work ~80% of the time but it could also severely screw you up.

erik123

I flew transatlantic 3.5 hours after my 2nd moderna dose.

While I would hesitate to recommend it my thinking was that the side effects tend to take 12 hours+ to manifest. It worked very well - the day after is when I started noticing some mild side effects.

GUWonder

Flew very quickly after my first vaccine shot, and I'll probably to try to fly rather quickly after my second vaccine jab too.

The J&J vaccine has been delivered millions of times without issue and it's gone over such that I'd take the J&J vaccine without hesitation if that was all that was available and being currently offered.

I did have a choice initially for whatever I wanted, and I actively chose to book one of the mRNA ones.

Welltended3

Moderna shot. First one, very very sore arm muscles, hurt to raise arm above shoulder. Started 12 hours after jab, lasted couple of days. Second shot, got chills and fever (101) for a day. Tylenol took care of fever.

Nothing lasting 2 weeks.

The 2 weeks is time to full immunity after the last shot. Or one shot if J&J.

These ate not covid symptoms. The warning not to fly may be because you're not fully immune yet.

WillCAD

My personal opinion on the original question is, vaccine side-effects are not the same as symptoms and thus need not be reported as symptoms.

However, those side-effects do resemble symptoms, so I'd recommend not attempting travel until they have fully dissipated. They're uncomfortable, and they make you appear to be legitimately ill, which is not a good position to be in when trying to get on a plane. Remember: WN threw a guy off a plane last week for removing his mask to eat Twizzlers and not replacing it in between bites - how do you think an airline, airport, or fellow travelers would react to someone trying to get on a plane with a fever, chills, or other side-effects that so strongly resemble Covid-19 symptoms?

It's been a while since you posted this, and you may have already passed the milestone, but if you scan the rest of this thread you'll see a lot of descriptions of vaccine side effects. Given my own experience with side effects after my second Pfizer shot this week, I'd recommend delaying your trip another day or two.

My side effects didn't manifest until about 24 hours after the shot. They included low-grade fever, chills, extreme fatigue, a minor headache, and all-over body aches. They lasted less than 24 hours, but they were just severe enough that anybody would have recognized that I was ill. Trying to travel while you're obviously ill could cause you all sorts of problems. Explaining that you're only suffering side-effects from your second vaccination shot probably wouldn't be enough - there are a lot of panicked people who will insist that you be incarcerated and quarantined and tested and burned at the stake for even considering getting on a plane while you've got a low-grade fever or chills or any other side-effects that resemble symptoms.

You may not get any side-effects, or they may appear earlier or later than mine, they may be more or less severe than mine, they may include different items, and they may have a longer or shorter duration than mine. It would be prudent, IMHO, to separate your travel by at least two days, possibly three, from the date of your second shot, to allow the side-effects to fully dissipate before traveling.

Nah, it's really not that bad. I had perhaps the second-worst set of side-effects of anyone I've talked to thus far, and they were no worse than a 1-day common cold. I had a similar experience from my flu shot last year.

Flonase is great, but unfortunately it has a side-effect in me that I find unpleasant - light-headedness that feels like a blood pressure spike. It's fine for a couple of days, but the longer I use it, the worse the effect becomes, so I can't use Flonase every day, I have to reserve it for days with particularly bad symptoms (like when they cut the grass in my apartment complex on Mondays).

My experience was nearly identical, except that my fever was much lower. I think I topped out at about 97.8, which is high for me; I average 95.5-96.5 during periods of low physical activity.

LtKernelPanic

I’ll echo not traveling y to or 2-3 days after your second dose if at all possible. After my first Pfizer shot I was no worse off than after my yearly flu shot. The second one started out fine but the next day I had chills, pounding headache and a low fever ~99.5 tops. Twelve hours later I was fine but there’s no way I’d have wanted to be anywhere near an airport or plane during that time.