I did hear from afew sources that Rabbi Twerski took the covid vaccine, & was niftar afew days later. If anyone has a statement disproving that, please share.
I admit I was also worried when I heard that. Not that it was from the vaccine, but that I heard that he had died while being treated from Covid. At least that was in the news I had read:
" He was Niftar
after contracting COVID-19 last week and had been hospitalized in a a hospital in Eretz Yisroel. He was 90."
https://www.theyeshivaworld.com/news/boruch-dayan-emmes/1944039/petira-of-rabbi-dr-a-j-twerski-ztl-niftar-from-covid-19-in-eretz-yisroel.htmlSo someone who was knowledgeable about medicine and had managed to avoid catching Covid for almost a year, suddenly gets it.... the same week he got the vaccine? I heard of a few other instances like this, and it seems to me that the most likely explanation is that they were infected around the time of getting the shot - either from the driver who took them, the medical personnel who administered it, the other people coming for vaccinations at the same time. Some of the pictures you see where vaccinations are being given show people in small rooms, or many people together, which makes it easier for an airborne virus to travel. This photo shows 2 people getting the vaccine, from 2 technicians, but it looks like another 9 people are within breathing distance.
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/covid-2020-12-18/card/lChtd0BqejvmRcSHelzkThis in itself is not a reason to avoid the vaccine, of course, but it is a reason to try to select the circumstances in which one gets it, to avoid having to be in a crowded space.
I had been wishing that people who catch Covid around the time of vaccination would publicize how they think they got it. And then, just this morning, I got such a phone call from family in Israel. I hadn't been wishing it would happen to someone I know, but it did. She's been carefully isolating due to contact with a vulnerable person, so she got the vaccine, and a week later came down with symptoms, and tested positive. The rest of her family tested negative to the virus, she quarantined, and is BH fine now. So how did she get infected with Covid? She remembered that the technician who gave her the shot seemed to be sniffling. Well, it was winter, maybe he had a cold, or allergies? But then she had another thought, and had her family tested for antibodies. Sure enough, her young child, who had been going to school and had not had symptoms tested positive for antibodies. So she she can't be sure whether it was from the technician or that her son caught the virus in school, and brought it home to her, around the same time that she happened to get the vaccine.