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Pharmacovigilance of the effects associated with vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 in the health personnel of a hospital for the exclusive care of patients with COVID-19

Abstract:

The Pablo Arturo Suárez Hospital, located in Quito, the capital of Ecuador, became an exclusive care hospital for COVID-19 patients in March 2020. It was one of the first centers to immunize its staff with a single type of vaccine, that of Pfizer-BioNTech. A pharmacovigilance study was conducted on 1304 health workers from this center who were immunized between January and March 2021. The vaccinated had an average age of 38.7 years, and the female sex predominated (63%). 81 (6%) immunized reported adverse effects, and their mean age was 38.8 years; women (69%) predominated, similar to the total population. Three hundred five adverse effects related to vaccines were reported; of them, only 1 (0.3%) was severe and required hospitalization, and the rest (23%) were non-serious. The most reported effects were headache, malaise, and pain at the injection site. The results show a parallel with what has been said worldwide on the safety of vaccines against COVID-19 in general and Pfizer-BioNTech in particular. The relevance of our work lies in the fact that it is one of the first reports of the reactogenicity of this vaccine in a high-altitude city at the beginning of the pandemic, in a court of health personnel directly dedicated to the care of this type of patient.