WHOOP Podcast - WHOOP COVID-19 vaccine research shows more symptoms in younger people, and following second dose

Episode Date: April 28, 2021

Emily Capodilupo, WHOOP VP of Data Science and Research, returns to the WHOOP Podcast to detail our latest COVID-19 vaccine research. We've found that younger people are more likely to be affected by the vaccine than older people. Additionally,  you should expect to feel more rundown by the second dose than the first, but any vaccine aftereffects are short lived and only last a day or two. Emily and Will Ahmed detail our research (0:55), the difference between mRNA and viral vector vaccines (4:19),  key takeaways (6:30), the second Pfizer and Moderna doses (8:30),  the most common reported symptom (12:10), how the vaccines affect sleep (12:40), why the vaccines are hitting young people harder (13:41), how quickly people bounce back from symptoms (17:37),  why we might need additional COVID immunizations (20:54), and how to best prepare for your shot (24:30).Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

What's up, folks? Welcome back to the WOOP podcast. I'm your host, Will Amid, founder and CEO of Woop. We have a very important podcast today talking about COVID vaccines and how they affect your body with the brilliant Emily Capital Lupo. We'll get to her in half a second. I want to first remind you that you can get 15% off a W-W-M-M-M-M-M-Ship. If you use the code Will-A-H-M-E-D. WOOP membership, of course, comes with hardware and software and analytics, and it's designed to help you improve your health, which frankly seems pretty important these days. Okay, Emily Capital Lupo on the podcast, our brilliant VP of data science and research, and we talk about all of the research that we have done on the COVID-19 vaccine, which actually is pretty considerable. We've got 51,000 doses reported by WOOP members, and we have looked at how that data is affecting your body. And we've looked at it a lot of different ways. So first, we talk about how the different vaccines, that includes Johnson and Johnson, Moderna, Pfizer, AstraZeneca affect your body, three of those vaccines being two shots, Johnson and Johnson being one shot.

Therefore, we also look at what's the difference between the first shot's response and the second shot's response. Spoiler, second shot, it's going to be a little more intense. We get into that. We also talk about how these vaccines are affecting people by age. If you're a younger person versus an older person, you're going to have a different response to these vaccines, which is quite fascinating. We talk about some of the things that I think are misunderstood about the vaccines,

today. And Emily explains lots of ways that you can prepare for your vaccine and recover from your vaccine. So I think this is a really important podcast. I'm very proud of all the research that the WOOP research team has done to really help everyone understand COVID-19 and vaccines and physiological response. I just think in general, research is so core to what we do at Woop. So I'm glad that we can put this out in the world. And I hope you as a listener, get value out of it. Now, if you have questions about this podcast or you want to learn more and you're a WOOP member, we have a WOOP member exclusive. You can go into the WOOP app, go into the community feature, and you will be able to ask Emily questions, whether it's about this podcast

or about the COVID-19 vaccine in general. Okay, without further ado, here is Emily. Emily, welcome back to the WOOP podcast. Thanks so much for having. So we are now 200 million shots in the United States into COVID-19 vaccines. More than half of the adult population has received at least one shot. One third of the American adult population is fully vaccinated. And we're starting to get a lot of data on what does the COVID-19 vaccine look like on whoop. Is that right?

Yeah, we've had just under 51,000 vaccines reported on WOOP. Really exciting. I mean, this has been a long journey for you and the research team in terms of all the research that we've done on COVID-19. I mean, I remember a little over a year ago now, we started doing research just on COVID-19 and WOOP data. That, of course, led to the discovery of an elevated respiratory rate being a predictor of COVID-19, which is an amazing finding.

And I think some of what we're going to talk about today is going to help people better understand the COVID-19 vaccine and also how it affects your body. Let's just very quickly explain the state of the union of the FDA and the three vaccines that are currently approved for emergency use. We have the Pfizer, which is two shots. We have the Moderna, which is two shots. We've got the Johnson and Johnson, which is one shot. Pfizer and Moderna use MRNA technology. Just give me like the 60 seconds on what that means. Yeah, and it's totally new here.

It's a huge reason why the vaccine was able to be produced so quickly. This is actually record-breaking speed. Previously, the fastest time to produce a vaccine was four years for the Mumps vaccine. And we did this in about a year. And so what the MRNA vaccines are doing is they're basically giving your body a chunk of like the code that allows us to actually produce the coronavirus spike protein as opposed to like traditional or like previous vaccine technology, which is giving you directly a piece of the vaccine protein, not like the code needed to produce it yourself. So it's a slightly different twist on that. but ultimately, like, it sort of works the same way as, you know, other vaccines where once you then create this foreign protein, our bodies attack it. And that's what our immune

system learns to defend against. And the J&J vaccine uses viral vector. The sort of more traditional method of doing this. Instead of giving you the code, it's getting you a piece of virus. And again, just to keep this very simple, the way vaccines work is essentially they're exposing your body to something that looks like a harmful pathogen, but it's actually harmless. And then it gives your body like a practice round against the pathogen. Would you say that's fair? Yeah. At a super high level, that's totally right. Sometimes it does actually give you the exact virus, but like killed or weakened. And sometimes it gives you these like chunks of virus. And so then you recognize this piece of the virus and then it doesn't matter what the rest of it looks like. But it's all this idea of like target

practice of some sort that we're you know the odds are stacked in our favor we've made it easier to defeat and then our immune system learns how to defeat it and so then when like the real deal shows up we already know how to handle that so we've got over 50,000 results let's start here the vaccine how has the first dose compared to the second dose in terms of how it's affected your body yeah so what we've seen in the loop data is very consistent with what you've probably heard on the news that for both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, people tend to have stronger reactions to the second one than they did for the first. And we're seeing that both in terms of the subjectively reported reactions. So people saying that they feel fatigue or having chills or

being nauseous, stuff like that. But then also in the objective loop data. So we're seeing larger increases in resting heart rate, larger decreases in HRV and recovery, and larger disturbances to the subsequent night's sleep. And while Pfizer and Moderna are by far the most popular in the U.S. or if they were approved first and have had the largest rollouts, we've also studied the single-dose Johnson and Johnson vaccine, as well as the two-dose AstraZeneca vaccine. One of the things that's interesting as you look at that data is that the reactions to the single-dose Johnson-and-Johnson vaccine look fairly similar to the Moderna second dose. And so it's almost like you're sort of getting both in one, right?

So it looks a lot like the second dose, and then you don't need a second dose on the J&J one. And the AstraZeneca one, we actually only have data for Woot members so far after the first dose. And largely because it's not being used in the U.S. And where it is really popular right now is in the U.K. And they've had a different rollout strategy than we've had here. In the U.K., they're trying to get everybody there for. first dose before anybody gets their second dose to try and get as many people as possible, at least somewhat protected. And what's really interesting there is that the first dose,

AstraZeneca, again, we haven't looked at the second dose yet, looks a lot like the J&J only dose, a lot like the Moderna and Pfizer second doses. And so it'll be interesting to see when the data comes in what the AstraZeneca's second dose ends up looking like. Now, if we look at the second dose, The second dose for Moderna and Pfizer, what are you seeing for that? Yeah, so we're seeing 71% and 60% of people experiencing a recovery score decrease, translating to about 44% and 27% having this 10% increase in resting heart rate, and 65 and 52% having this decrease in HRV. What's really interesting about comparing those numbers is that the sort of,

incidents of these, like, stronger reactions at the second dose are much higher for Moderna than for Pfizer, even though they're using very similar technology. And this has been, this is very consistent with what we're seeing in the symptom data as well, which we'll get to. But also, interestingly, like the Moderna vaccine is using about four times the dose as the Pfizer one. And so it's like somewhat consistent with that that we're seeing these higher reactions. but the data coming out of, you know, the various clinical trials that these vaccines are doing.

So not whoop data does show very, very similar efficacy of the two vaccines. Okay, got it. So Pfizer folks are having a slightly less strong physiological response than Moderna folks after the second shot. But as a general rule, both parties are seeing elevated resting heart rates and decreased heart rate variabilities. Yeah, we're seeing that, you know, despite. the vaccines working roughly equally well. It seems like the Pfizer one is physiologically the easiest one to receive. The reactions are the smallest. Okay, understood. Now, we've collected a lot of symptom data, which has been reported by WOOP members. What does that look like for the first dose

versus, say, the second dose? Yeah. So what we're seeing is that the symptom data really nicely lines up with the WOOP data. And so very, very similar patterns, both across the different vaccine manufacturers as well as between the first and second dose. So using the WOOP journal feature, we collected data about fatigue, muscle aches, chills, and fever, and then also gave people the option to say that they experienced no side effects. And what we saw is that people reported higher rates of symptoms or side effects for the second dose than they did for the first dose across Pfizer and Moderna where we were able to compare the

two. And that we saw just like, you know, the stronger whoop reaction in terms of resting heart at HRV recovery to Moderna than Pfizer, we see both in the first and second dose sort of higher rates of reporting side effects in Moderna versus Pfizer. And then when we look at just the first vaccine dose, so AstraZeneca, Moderna and Pfizer, we're seeing the high. highest incidence of any of the symptoms being reported in the case of AstraZeneca, which was consistent with them having, you know, the highest incidence of increased resting heart rate or decreased respiratory rate. And again, that that response, to the first dose of AstraZeneca, symptom-wise, it looks a lot like the response to the only dose of Johnson and Johnson,

which in both cases is slightly stronger than the second dose of Pfizer and Moderna. Now, across all the vaccines, what are sort of the common, what's like the most common reported symptom that people are feeling? Or what's the order of symptoms, if you will? Yeah, so fatigue, definitely. So that's the most common symptom that we're seeing. Yeah, so just shy of 80% of people reported fatigue after the second Pfizer and Moderna vaccines and the first AstraZeneca vaccine.

We're definitely seeing smaller numbers for the first. Pfizer and Moderna ones, the majority of people after the first dose will not experience fatigue. We're seeing that 40% of people who receive the Pfizer first dose report nothing, and 30% of people who receive the Moderna first dose report nothing. How does the vaccine affect your sleep? We're seeing a decrease in total sleep time across all vaccines, both for the first and second dose. And again, with that same pattern we've been talking about, where it's more prevalent following the second dose. And we think that this has to do with, you know, when you have a fever,

you're not like feeling great. It's harder to get posy and fall asleep. We're also seeing a decrease in like the more restorative stages of sleep, you know, like the, your slow wave and REM sleep, you know, for the second vaccine, about 50% of people who received Moderna and 37% of people who received Pfizer, had lower quality sleep following that second dose. And again, this totally goes away after one night of slightly disturbed sleep. So it's a good idea if you are receiving these vaccines to plan to get into bed a little bit earlier. If you can, you know, take the day off of work the next day so that you can sleep in because you just might not feel as well rested if you don't feel that it's harder to sleep. Now, have we seen any difference in how the vaccines are affecting

people by age? Yes. We're seeing a much stronger reaction in younger people than we are in older groups. For every symptom that we looked at, as well as the objective loop data, we're seeing that younger cohorts are experiencing all of the symptoms more frequently across all the different vaccines and seeing higher incidences of the increased resting heart rate and decrease HRB that we were talking about earlier. What would be the explanation for that? Stronger immune systems. So it's actually a good thing in a weird way to have this reaction because the stronger your immune system is, the more we're going to like divert resources, attack this invading protein, and then try and convert that to a sort of stored immune response so that if we

then get exposed to COVID, we can handle it. And so what we're seeing, and it's a little bit counterintuitive, is that younger, healthier people are getting like more knocked out by these vaccines. But the good news is because we did look at not just the reaction to the data, but also the return to baseline after that in the WOOP data, you know, we are seeing especially in this youngest cohort, the 18 to 30 year olds, a strong reaction. But by the second night after the vaccine, they're totally back to baseline. And so, you know, unlike COVID, where it takes a long time to return to baseline because you do get sick, you know, you're going to see the strong reaction, but it's super, super short lived. So,

nothing to get too freaked out about. It's really worth calling that out because one of the dumbest things I've heard from young people who are like, oh, I don't need the vaccine. If I get the vaccine, I get sick. If I don't get the vaccine, I'll just get COVID and I'll get sick. It's the same thing. That's so dumb because as you just described, yes, you have this physiological response, but it's for a very short period of time when you get the vaccine, say 24 hours. And a bunch of people don't even have a response, even the most do, versus COVID, which we've seen in WOP data, can have an effect for weeks. And unfortunately, in some cases, like, your body is affected physiologically for months. Yeah. I mean, like, looking at this data, it's nothing like what

we were seeing when we were looking at the COVID data a couple months ago. Although it is kind of for that first day. I mean, the screenshots people send me of their like second dose right afterwards. You do see these like huge respiratory jumps and decreases in HRV. But the more important thing to underscore here is that goes away quickly. Yeah, well, that's a great point. And you know, this whole, you know, foray into this vaccine data very much came from the huge number of screenshots that our members were sharing of these like single digit recovery scores on the day of their vaccine. And so, you know, that looks a lot like what we're seeing when people were getting COVID. But the we're seeing is like, you know, people get this like 2% recovery of the day after their vaccine.

But then they're, you know, green the day after that, which was definitely not happening with COVID. So you do get this kind of like freaky response. And, you know, I think there's this opportunity for people to have a little bit of that, like, freak out moment. But our real goal with this research is to be comforting. Like, to me, I look at this data and I'm like, okay, this is fine. And like, it's actually kind of a bit of a weird moment for me because I'm getting my second dose tomorrow. So to be like recording this podcast now, like I actually really comforted by this data because I know that like Saturday I might feel a little bit crappy and that's fine because like it's not scary to not feel good when you're like this is just a normal vaccine reaction versus like when you don't feel good and you're like is this COVID like that's actually really scary and upsetting. So like now I'm going to go into this vaccine knowing that like, you know, I might need to take it easy for 24 hours, but my body's going to kick this thing.

I'm not actually sick. nothing is wrong. You know, it's almost like kind of weird, but it's like a good pain or something like that. So broadly speaking, what we're seeing is that the vaccine is having a physiological response, but it's for a very short period of time. Like how short a period of a time would you frame this is? Yeah. So we're looking at the whoop data at night. And what we're seeing is like that night after you get vaccinated. So, you know, 12 hours later, there's definitely the sign, you know, elevated resting heart rate, suppressed HRV, suppressed recovery scores, disrupted sleep, and then the night after, it looks exactly like the three-week baselines that we were comparing

it to. So no indication of anything abnormal going on after that across all of the different age groups, across all of the different vaccine manufacturers that we've looked at. I mean, very encouraging. This is a good, this is a great argument if you, you know, you didn't already have one for why you should get this vaccine. vaccine. For sure. And we should mention that neither of us are medical doctors and none of the information in this podcast is meant to be interpreted as medical advice. Everybody should talk to their own health care providers about what makes the most sense for them. And if they have any concerns about vaccine safety, definitely don't look to this podcast as attempting to answer that.

We just want to share the information that we're seeing in our members with our data because it's interesting and because so many of you have asked us about it. Let's do a quick myth busters. If you're vaccinated, can you still get COVID? So that's actually an interesting question right now because one of the things that's going on is that the virus is mutating. So you're protected against most strains of COVID. And this is going to be an interesting storyline to follow because, and this is like also

where we get into these conversations you've probably seen in the news around herd immunity and this idea that like if we all get vaccinated that that becomes protective because if the if most like say let's say we in the u.s do a really good job um or like Israel's done a really good job getting everybody vaccinated but other countries don't it becomes this like they call them a reservoir where these other people can continue to spread and circulate covid and in these other unvaccinated people these strains that were protected against can start to mutate. And then if those mutated strains get sufficiently far away from the ones we've developed vaccines for, and then those get back into the West or get back into countries that

have done a good job with their vaccination, then there's a risk that this like next generation COVID strain could become dangerous to us again. And so this really is like a super interesting global health problem because we're actually not going to eradicate COVID unless we get everybody vaccinated and there's a lot of like politics and like weird things going on with like who's getting the vaccine and who's not. But like we do need global herd immunity or the expectation is that if it sticks around in enough people, it'll mutate, it'll get sufficiently different. And then it'll become like the flu, which is basically exactly this situation where because enough people get the flu every year, it mutates. And that's why we actually need a flu vaccine

every year because it's a different flu than the one we were vaccinated against last year. And so the Pfizer CEO actually recently came out and said that they expect that we're going to need a booster in 12 months and that that booster is not because the vaccines we're getting are like necessarily wearing off, but because it'll actually be a different COVID that we're getting vaccinated against. So you shouldn't be able to get COVID super close to getting vaccinated because the strains that exist today you'll be protected against. But unless the whole whole world gets vaccinated pretty quickly or enough that we get herd immunity, we do anticipate that it'll mutate and then we'll need to get vaccinated again. Got it. I mean, it's such an

interesting moment in time. And I do think you're right that there'll be additional COVID-related vaccines in the years to come. How about this question of someone who got COVID should they get vaccinated? Oh, I already got COVID. I don't need to get vaccinated. Yes. So current guidelines do recommend that people who had COVID still get vaccinated, and that's to protect them against other strains that they maybe didn't get, as well as because, like, sort of, it's not yet super well understood how, like, long the protection lasts or anything like that of actually getting the virus. And so they're recommending that you get vaccinated as well. Okay. So full recap here. We looked at over 51,000 doses. We analyzed four different vaccines,

Johnson and Johnson, AstraZeneca, Moderna, and Pfizer. From a purely physiological response, the first shots tended to have less of a result. The second shots tended to have more of a result or more of a reaction. We're talking elevated resting heart rates, and we're talking decreased heart rate variability being much more pronounced in the second shot than the first shot. We also saw that younger people, just across the board,

had a stronger reaction. So if you're 18 to 30 years old, you're more likely to have an elevated resting heart rate or a decreased heart rate variability following a vaccine than if you're over the age of 50, for example. And we also saw that across the board, getting a vaccine seems to negatively impact your sleep. Now, on the positive side,

all of these results that we looked at, the physiological results, appear to be very short-lived, right, Emily? So this is happening in the first 12 hours, 24 hours, but looking 36, 48 hours out, all of a sudden someone's body's back to normal. Is that right? Exactly.

So, you know, the quick analysis being, hey, the vaccine looks like something you should definitely get. Yeah, and I mean, that's certainly CDC guidelines. So, you know, I think definitely comparing this to what we saw, you know, with the COVID data, right? this is so, so much more mild than actually getting COVID. So if you're looking at this data to be like, should I get vaccinated, like 100% go get vaccinated? I couldn't support that more.

And for people who are on the fence who are now going to go get vaccinated, what's the best thing did you to prepare for your vaccine to limit its physiological reaction? Yeah. And so I think that's really like sort of what all of this interestingly like boils down to. So if you're going to go get your first shot of either Moderna or Pfizer, like I think for almost everybody can plan to feel totally fine after really no need to change much of what you're doing. If you know you're going to receive the Johnson Johnson vaccine or AstraZeneca or if you're about to receive your second dose of Moderna and Pfizer, it's probably a good idea to plan to be nice to yourself in like the 24 hours after the vaccine.

So I wouldn't schedule a super tough workout after that, you know, maybe plan to be able to get into bed a little bit earlier in order to compensate. for what's likely to be, you know, decreased sleep quality or, you know, trouble falling to sleep, stuff like that. But no real need to do much else. Like I'd say plan to take it easy. If you can take the day off of work, that's awesome. But, you know, don't, don't plan on doing something super strenuous or super difficult and, you know, plan to be back, back in business in two days. And then, you know, as far as like how to actually prepare other than planning to take it easy, eating well, staying hydrated and getting enough sleep the night before. I will give your body enough resources to mount this immune response and to have this intended

response in order to keep you safe. There's also some really interesting vaccine research that was done by this guy, Eric Praser out in California. And he looked at how sleep deprivation prior to vaccination actually, and this was in the case of hepatitis A vaccines, determined whether or not you developed antibodies, so the intended response to the vaccine. And so people who are super sleep deprived when they received a vaccine actually got less protective benefits from it. And so we definitely recommend for all vaccines, first and second dose, to get a good night sleep the night before.

Seems like a recurring theme that we recommend to Woot members. Yeah, I recommend sleep for all reasons every night. But if you're really going to make an effort one night, it's a good example of a night we maybe want to set sleep coach to peak. Okay, Emily, well, great research, as always. It's been amazing tracking what you and your team have done for the last 15 months from first trying to figure out what is COVID-19 to doing all the research on before, during and after, looking at whoop data to publishing research around elevated respiratory rate

being a predictor to now having research that I'm sure we're going to publish soon on looking at how the vaccines are affecting your body. So it's been an amazing body of work. I hope you and your team are proud of it. Also, Emily, you're going to be doing an AMA within the WOOP app for our WOOP members, correct? Yeah, looking forward to it. All right, Emily, thanks for coming on, and we'll talk to you soon. Yeah, thanks for having me.

Thank you again to Emily for all this amazing research that she's done at Woop and her team has done at Woop. I think it's so core to what we do. It's so important for society at large, and we will continue to do research on COVID-19, and we'll continue to research on everything else. think this is one of the benefits to having incredibly scalable and incredibly accurate technology is that we can do this analysis and we can share it with you all. A reminder, you can get 15% off a WOOP membership if you use the code Will Ahmed. That's WI-L-L-A-H-M-E-D. And you can find us on social at Will Ahmed at WOOP. Get vaccinated. Stay healthy. Thanks for listening. We'll see you

next week. I don't know.