Spectrum News: Doctor Discusses Safety and Side Effects as Vaccine Eligibility Expands

Spectrum News interviewed Alan Sanders, M.D., chief medical officer for St. Peter’s Health Partners Acute Care, to answer some common questions surrounding the COVID-19 vaccines.

From the story:

There have been many questions about the process and about the vaccines themselves.

Dr. Alan Sanders from St. Peter’s Health Partners tries to answer some of those questions and dispel a few myths. Sanders says although the younger generation typically doesn’t get serious symptoms with COVID-19, they can spread it to other people and cause problems that way.

“We know that young people usually have a very good take on the vaccine, meaning they have a very good antibody production after getting vaccinated, and if they’re serving as a large pool of individuals who get infected, that would be a large population of people who can affect someone else,” Sanders said.

Some of you may have seen on the internet or social media concerns about the vaccine’s impact on fertility.

“There’s been a lot of chatter online about the vaccination, that it gets into your DNA, that it messes with your DNA, which is really the backbone of making new cells, everything from blood cells to reproductive cells. There is no evidence that the little thread of RNA, little thread of DNA that gets injected into the muscle and then produces a lot of proteins, has anything to do with an individual’s changes in DNA. It doesn’t last at all. After it does its job, it’s destroyed by the immune system, that little hunk of DNA. In terms of long-term effects, in terms of fertility, we’ve seen none of that,” Sanders said.

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