Filenews 29 April 2021
The side effects that the vaccine against coronavirus can cause are nothing new in the vaccination process, as any side effect can be a sign that our immune system is reacting against the virus, something scientists are well aware of. However, according to the Norwegian Medicines Agency, in Norway side effects in women appear to be more common compared to their male peers. More specifically. the service has received a total of 5,635 cases of side effects, of which 4,684 involve women.
Similarly, the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention analysed data from the first 13.7 million doses of vaccines, reaching the same results: nearly 80% of the side effects, and indeed, serious ones, occurred in women even though only 60% of those vaccinated at the time were women. What explanation do scientists give? One interpretation is that women compared to men are more likely to report any side effects to health authorities. But biological differences between the sexes may be a more certain answer to this puzzle.
The serious side effects of vaccines on women
"This gender gap is entirely in line with previous reports from other vaccines," microbiologist and anosologist Sabra Klein, from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, tells the New York Times about the results of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. More specifically, all 19 cases of anaphylaxis from the Moderna vaccine were female. In addition, 44 of the 47 cases of post-vaccination anaphylaxis from the Pfizer vaccine were also female. For the Astrazeneca vaccine, most people who had post-vaccination thrombosis were women under 60 years of age according to the EMA. However, the case study did not provide the basis for identifying specific risk factors, including gender or age, according to the EMA.
The solution of the puzzle
In recent years the scientific community has turned to these gender differences in relation to vaccines. According to research published in Seminars in Immunopathology, in 2019, women and young girls tend to develop more potent antibodies and therefore experience more serious side effects compared to men. Young people have a stronger immune system compared to older people because the immune system declines as we get older, while in general the female immune system is activated more strongly than men: "After infections, women tend to have a stronger immune response compared to men, both in antibodies and in T lymphocytes," says Gunnveig Grødeland , an anosologist and researcher in the Department of Clinical Medicine at the University of Oslo (UiO), "but the disadvantage for women is that they can also experience stronger autoimmune responses, which means that the immune system attacks the body itself", she adds. This may explain the results of a 2020 survey that concluded that more women than men suffer from autoimmune diseases.
The Trump of Women
"Hormones influence how the body reacts to an infection, but further research is needed on whether testosterone plays a particular role," says Anne Spurkland, an anaesthesiologist and professor of medicine at the University of Oslo in an article on explaining most deaths of men at the beginning of the pandemic compared to women. This creates an assumption that chromosomes affect the functioning of the immune system of both sexes. Many genes associated with the immune system are found on the X chromosome – the weak sex carries two (XX), while men have one (XY).
Source: ygeiamou.gr
