A recent report assessed the incidence of sudden sensorineural hearing loss (SSNHL, or “nerve deafness”) associated with recent receipt of a Covid-19 vaccine.
As of today, just under 286 million Covid-19 vaccines have been administered in the United States, with an average daily vaccination rate of 1.8 million doses. These numbers include all doses of the PfizerBioNTech and Moderna double-dose regimens, as well as single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine. As millions in the U.S. and globally have received vaccines (1.65 billion shots to date worldwide), recorded accounts of medical issues temporally associated with vaccine administration are being collected. While some issues, including rare blood clotting possibly linked to the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, led to a temporary pause in vaccine distribution, myriad other issues, which may or may not have any causal link to the vaccines, are being studied. A recent report published in this week’s JAMA Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery assessed the incidence of sudden sensorineural hearing loss (SSNHL, or “nerve deafness”) associated with recent receipt of one of the two mRNA SARS-CoV-2 vaccines between December 14,2020 and March 2, 2021. The study group, based at the Johns Hopkins University Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, reviewed data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). During the timeframe of the data review, over 86.
