Okla. Doctor Creates Blog To Help People Understand COVID-19 Vaccine

Every day thousands of Oklahomans are getting the COVID-19 vaccine. But there is still a decent amount of fear and speculation surrounding it.

One Oklahoma doctor is helping people understand the vaccine by sharing his experience on social media.

Doctor Adam Karpman is the medical director of Cardiac quality at Saint Francis Hospital/. When Dr. Karpman got the COVID-19 vaccine, he began to get a lot of questions about it.

He developed a passion for wanting to give people accurate and transparent information about the COVID-19 vaccine and decided a facebook blog was a way to do that. Now it has more than 1,000 followers. Some posts have reached more than 30,000 people.

Dr. Karpman says he understands the fear people have about the vaccine. He himself had a serious reaction to his second dose.

“I had a very significant immune response to the second vaccine. And what I mean by that is I developed chills, fever, nausea and I really had a tough go at it. That happened with the second vaccine that lasted for about 12 hours," says Karpman.

Karpman shares the experience on his blog and says a reaction like his can and does happen. He says it is normal and people should not be afraid. To read more about his experience you can follow his blog.

"I wanted people to have a clear understanding of what the possible immune responses could be to the vaccine and know that that’s normal and it’s actually working," says Karpman.

He hopes that by sharing his experience people won't feel like they are getting the vaccine without feeling informed of the possible side effects.

"To go into that without having that knowledge beforehand can be really frightening. So to just post about that I think is really powerful and that post alone has reached over 34 thousand people,” says Karpman.

He says he also thinks it helps Oklahoman's feel more comfortable knowing they are getting accurate information from someone local.

“I think the bigger issue right now is there is just so much information out there that is not factual. That people are putting stuff out there on Facebook and it looks really really good," he says. "So to have a local physician go through the medical literature, stay on top of it and say hey this is what we know today, here is what we knew yesterday, here is what we could change, I think is really really powerful.”

Now that Karpman is recovered he says the blog has evolved really into a medical information forum and he will continue to share new information about the vaccines.

He wants people to continue to have easy access to facts about the vaccine that they can trust are accurate.