Home care agencies may want to consider giving their workers a day off following the second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. At least, that’s what one medical expert is suggesting.
Stanley Weiss, M.D., an infectious disease specialist and epidemiologist at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, recently told the news outlet MedPage Today that, for some, second vaccine doses can hit people hard. So hard, in fact, that he encourages hospital administrators “to figure that many healthcare workers getting the vaccine might not be well enough to work the day after the second dose.”
He also said administrators are being careful not to vaccinate staff from within the same units on the same day.
Meanwhile, older recipients of the vaccine are thought to have less of a reaction due to the typical weakening of the immune system as people age, said Purvi Parikh, M.D., an immunologist at NYU Langone Health in New York City.
“[It could be] that their immune system is not as robust as a young person’s,” he said.
