synth-ruiner I suppose it's more "effects" than "side effects" since provoking an immune response is the whole point
I thought about this for a while, and decided that it depends entirely upon your point of view. The reason I called what I described "side-effects" is because the vaccine's primary purpose is not to make your arm hurt, or to give you a headache. We don't take the vaccine in order to experience sore muscles, or to have a stiff neck, or to miss a couple days of work (or worse, for a few). These are the things that we might need to suffer in order to get that desired immune response. We suffer them in order to avoid a much more serious fate at the hands of the virus.
But it's the worst cases that prompt news reports. You hear about or read about the blood clots that can cause death, or the flu-like symptoms that have made some miss a week of work. You see social media complaints that "it completely kicked my ass." But those millions of us who could have mostly ignored the symptoms don't make the news, and we don't tell our Facebook friends how terrible our ordeal was. I wanted to tell all y'all about such a case.
And mostly I wanted to tell you what my wife's doctor told us: If it makes you uncomfortable for a while, that's how you know the first dose is working, and that you're being protected. That's something to look forward to.
