Ohioans can sign up to help with vaccine research

As more Ohioans continue to get vaccinated, there is a way everyone can be involved in the national effort to learn more about the vaccines.

“One of the questions that everybody asked when we started, ‘how safe is this?’ Because we don’t have that long term data,” Dr. Robert Colón, the chief medical officer for Miami Valley Hospital said.

He explained, the CDC’s v-safe program is a way to help researchers gather that data.

“It’s an opportunity for everybody to really be part of that body of evidence moving forward,” Dr. Colón said.

V-safe is a smartphone based tool that uses text messages and web surveys to provide personalized health check-ins after someone gets a Covid vaccine.

“To really see how well we can monitor the symptoms,” Dr. Colón said. “And can we aggregate that data to better understand- are these occasional symptoms that people are reporting significant or are they isolated?”

He is signed up for v-safe and said it is not meant to track people, just monitor how they are feeling.

“The app is really designed to be able to get information about how your symptoms are, to be able to make vaccines safer and to understand them better. It’s for scientific purposes,” Dr. Colón said.

He is encouraging everyone to enroll after getting vaccinated.

“It allows the scientists and medical professionals who are running these programs to really be able to look at the data more periodically and see if symptoms are starting to creep up that require some additional attention,” Dr. Colón said.

Cox Media Group