Mods, wasn’t sure if this belongs here or QZ. I’m thinking this will be a short thread. The monkey pox vaccine was given to me on Sunday, August 7 at 1700, 5 PM.
I do fit the criteria for the vaccine as a man who has sex with men, that happens rarely but it is still my profile.
The vaccine was painless, they pinch your left arm slightly and administer the injection, absolutely painless. It was also free even though I have excellent health insurance. The side effects were incredibly mild, just a slight soreness in my left arm. No exhaustion like after the Covid vaccines.
Congratulations and thank you for stepping up for responsible public health measures! Do you happen to know anybody who has monkeypox? How are they handling it, and are they getting any discriminatory/phobic shit for it? (Did you get any discriminatory/phobic shit on account of your vaccination? Hope not.)
Ooh, I see why they want to expand the availability of the new vaccine. I gather it is a replacement for the old smallpox vaccine (and was developed as a smallpox vaccine, but animal studies show it should also protect against monkey pox). The old smallpox vaccine made people sick, left a permanent scar, and had a high-for-a-vaccine risk of death.
I don’t know anyone who has monkey pox. The social shaming of ‘Market Days is a super spreader!!’ event was horrible, there’s no public sex or anything. I watched a couple of bands perform, ate some excellent Guatemalan food with my friend and then got my jab.
Really? I still recall the day in 1947 that they took the whole elementary school out to the school yard and gave us all the smallpox vaccine (cowpox, of course). It was just a scratch on the arm, no one got sick, and it did leave a scar that I still have. But I never heard of any serious side-effects.
They probably weren’t well advertised, but they did exist. Sometimes the vaccinia virus spread from the inoculation site, leading to more extensive scarring. (The old vaccine was a live virus). If it spread to the eyes it could cause blindness. There were was progressive vaccinia when the vaccine’s virus destroyed skin tissue which, as the name implies progressed - sometimes over the entire body. Not as fatal as it used to be, but still requiring skin grafts to repair extensive areas of damage.
People with a history of eczema are at higher risk of these side effects than the general population, as is anyone with a suppressed immune system.
The old smallpox vaccine had the highest rate of adverse effects and death of any vaccine used in the 20th Century. Yes, those events were statistically rare, but still tragedies when they occurred.
As someone with a history of eczema I’m quite pleased they’ve come up with a safer alternative.
(For the record - I did get the old smallpox vaccine as a baby, and still have the scar to prove it, so it was not invariably a disaster when given to someone with eczema but the risks were definitely higher.)
I was an infant, and don’t remember my small pox vaccine. Maybe it was uncommon to get sick from it, beyond the one pock. But when I was reading up on the shortage of the new vaccine, and about the reluctance to use the stockpiled old vaccine, I was impressed by all the issues with the old vaccine. (and the stockpiled vaccine is a little safer than the one most of us oldies had.)
How old are you? My records show I got it as a baby in 1965, but I don’t have the classic arm scar. I do have a small crater on my shin, but that could also be from chicken pox. They stopped giving it routinely around 1972.
And of course, even with the risks of the old smallpox vaccine, it was still the safe, sane, and rational course of action, compared to smallpox. We modern folks have largely forgotten what a real pestilence is like. Which is both a blessing and a curse: May we remember the real pestilence, without needing a reminder.
I didn’t know about the higher scarring risk. I’ve also wondered why I sport no vaccine scar but my older and younger siblings all have the scar. I’m guessing they skipped giving me the scar based on the history of my extensive allergies. How extensive? Rice gave me eczema as a infant/toddler. Though the allergy did disappear as I got older, it is a very rare one and it freaked out my doctors. Rice had been identified as the most non-allergenic food possible at the time. Since that time it has been identified as a possible, but still very rare, infant allergy.
I got my first MPX vax on Monday. My county only acknowledged monkeypox about two weeks ago and there’s nowhere to get the vaccine anywhere in this county. Amazing, since we’re in the San Francisco Bay Area.
I managed to grab an appointment at a pharmacy a few counties away. I’ve had no reaction other than the injection site is still sore. My partner, OTOH, felt awful the next day. He got clobbered with headaches and vertigo attacks from all four of the Covid shots (Moderna then Pfizer boosters) so I’m not too surprised.
The current scheme in California and some other states is to prioritize getting as many first shots into as many arms as possible then doing the second shot. There’s apparently no “penalty” for delaying the second other than not getting the full effectiveness - it’s not like we’ll need to start over again when more doses are available.
Regarding the smallpox scar…my vaccination is invisible, but my mom’s smallpox scar was (IIRC) at least an inch across, and quite noticeable if she wore sleeveless dresses. So I conclude the technology has changed over the years.
Then you may not have been vaccinated. by the 1960’s the risk of having an eczema history was known and sometimes used as a justification for foregoing the vaccine. As smallpox had been eliminated from the Western Hemisphere by then skipping the vaccine in a few, medically justified cases posed minimal risk.
The old vaccine always left a scar. Sometimes it was more obvious, sometimes less, and they do fade with age, but you would have had one as a kid if you’d been vaccinated. They might have skipped you due to your medical history.
Regarding the scar from the smallpox vaccination, it’s much more difficult to find my husband’s scar, compared to when I first met him, more than 3 decades ago.
I never got vaccinated for smallpox, as I am just a little bit too young. Oddly enough, my husband’s sister, who is younger than me, did get vaccinated. I think she got vaccinated very young.
For those who were able to get the vaccination, I’ll add my congrats and thanks. Science rules!
Um, yeah, that. Even in high school, my friends noticed I didn’t have the scar but I forgot to ask my mother about whether or not I received the vaccine.