Mild Adverse Events of Sputnik V Vaccine Extracted from Russian Language Telegram Posts via BERT Deep Learning Model

Abstract

Background: There is a limited amount of data on the COVID-19 vector vaccine Gam-COVID-Vac (Sputnik V) safety profile. Previous infodemiology studies showed that social media discourse could be analyzed to assess the most concerning adverse events (AE) caused by drugs. Objective: We aimed to investigate mild AEs of Sputnik V based on a participatory trial conducted on Telegram in the Russian language. We compared AEs extracted from Telegram with other limited databases on Sputnik V and other COVID-19 vaccines. We explored symptom co-occurrence patterns and determined how counts of administered doses, age, gender, and sequence of shots could confound the reporting of AEs. Materials and Methods: We collected a unique dataset consisting of 11,515 self-reported Sputnik V vaccine AEs posted on the Telegram group, and we utilized natural language processing methods to extract AEs. Specifically, we performed multi-label classifications using the deep neural language model BERT DeepPavlov, which we pre-trained on a Russian language corpus and applied to the Telegram messages. The resulting AUC score was 0.991. We chose symptom classes that represented the following AEs: fever, pain, chills, fatigue, nausea/vomiting, headache, insomnia, lymph node enlargement, erythema, pruritus, swelling, and diarrhea. Results: The results of the retrospective analysis showed that females reported more AEs than males (1.2-fold, P<.001). In addition, there were more AEs from the first dose than from the second dose (1.13-fold, P<.001), and the number of AEs decreased with age (β = .05 per year, P<.001). The results also showed that Sputnik V AEs were more similar to other vector vaccines (132 units) compared with mRNA ones (241 units) according to the average Euclidean distance between the vectors of AE frequencies. Elderly Telegram users reported significantly more (5.6-fold on average) systemic AEs than their peers, according to the results of the phase III clinical trials published in The Lancet. However, the AEs reported in Telegram posts were consistent (Pearson correlation r=.94, P=.02) with those reported in the Argentinian post-marketing AE registry. Conclusion: After receiving the Sputnik V vaccination, Telegram users complained about pain (47%), fever (47%), fatigue (34%), and headache (25%). The results showed that the AE profile of Sputnik V was comparable with other COVID-19 vaccines. Examining the sentinel properties of participatory trials (which is subject to self-reporting biases) could still provide meaningful information about pharmaceutics, especially if only a limited amount of information on AEs is provided by producers.

Potential Adverse Effects of COVID-19 Vaccines on Iranian Healthcare Workers: Comparison of Four Avai able Vaccines in Tehran: A Retrospective Cross-sectional Study

“…Previous studies showed that the most common side effects of the Sputnik vaccine were injection site pain followed by fever, fatigue, headache, lethargy, and muscle and joint pain. 32 , 33 Our results revealed that the most common complication of Sputnik was muscle pain followed by fever, fatigue, chills, topical reaction, cold-like symptoms, and dizziness or headache. The most common side effects of the Covaxin vaccine were fever, topical reaction, fatigue, muscle pain, chills, cold-like symptoms, and dizziness or headache.…”

Side Effects of the Sinopharm/BBIBP COVID-19 Vaccine among Iranian Healthcare Workers: A Gender Assessment

“…As mentioned earlier (Figure 2), in our study, 12 complications (e.g., topical reactions, fatigue, and muscle pain) showed a significantly higher occurrence rate in women than in men. The results of previous studies have reported this finding on the effects of different vaccines, including AstraZeneca and Sputnik (16,18,19). However, the results of some studies showed no significant difference between men and women (15,20).…”

Counting on COVID-19 vaccine: Insights into the current strategies, progress and future challenges

“…Occurrences of adverse events were higher in females and in the age groups below 55 years. A recent infodemiology study by Jarynowski et al [202] claims Sputnik V to cause mild to moderate adverse effects in females compared to males and increasing in number with increaseing age (0.05/year, p<0.001). Reported adverse events were in line with other vector vaccines including fever, pain, fatigue, and headache.…”