What We’re Reading: COVID-19 Booster Adverse Effects; New York Health Care Workers Hit 92% Vaccination Rate; Global Hypertension Prevalence Exceeds 1 Billion

Adverse Effects of COVID-19 Booster Similar to Those of Second Shot

CDC data showed that people who have received a third dose of a COVID-19 vaccine reported similar adverse effects to those after the second dose, STAT News reported. More than 12,500 people completed a survey after receiving a third dose of Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna. Of this group, 79.4% reported local reactions such as itching or redness at the injection site, and 74.1% reported systemic reactions. Most systemic reactions were fatigue, muscle aches, and headaches, and they mostly occurred the day after receiving the shot. For reference, after the second dose, 77.6% and 76.5% of participants reported local and systemic reactions, respectively. The report added that “no unexpected patterns of adverse reactions were observed” after the third dose.

Thousands of New York Health Care Workers Receive COVID-19 Vaccine by Mandate Deadline

The percentage of New York health care workers vaccinated against COVID-19 jumped by about 10 percentage points in the course of a week, as reported by The New York Times. After the vaccine mandate took full effect Monday, 92% of the state’s more than 650,000 hospital and nursing home workers had received at least 1 dose of a COVID-19 vaccine—a significant increase from the Monday prior, when 82% of nursing home workers and at least 84% of hospital workers had received at least 1 dose. The New York City public hospital system alone had around 3000 health care workers get vaccinated within a week. This jump in vaccination rates gives New York one of the highest vaccination rates among health care workers in the country.

More Than 1.2 Billion Individuals Worldwide Live With Hypertension

As of 2019, more than 1.2 billion individuals were living with hypertension or high blood pressure, The New York Times reported. According to an international study published in The Lancet, this number has doubled in the past 30 years, and approximately 652 million men and 626 million women have hypertension. However, nearly half of them were unaware they have the condition, and more than half were not receiving treatment. In the United States, about 45% of adults have hypertension or are taking medication for it, but only 1 in 4 adults with the condition have it under control, according to the CDC.