Getting vaccinated is one way to help protect yourself from getting seriously ill with COVID-19. After your vaccine shots, you may experience some side effects. The most common ones are sore arm, muscle aches, headache, feeling tired, chills or fever.
Even if the side effects mentioned above are strong enough to affect your daily activities, they should go away in a few days and are not a sign you have COVID-19. The available vaccines don’t contain live coronavirus and can’t make you sick with COVID-19. The vaccine doesn’t work immediately. If you develop a sore throat, stuffy nose, altered taste or smell, cough, breathing problems, diarrhea or vomiting, these might mean that you have developed a COVID-19 infection before the vaccine started working.
If you think you’re having a severe allergic reaction, call 911 immediately.