Jeffrey Bland, PhD describes a personal experiment using an Oura Ring and other biometric devices to track physiological responses to his Moderna COVID-19 vaccinations. After the first dose his Oura readiness score dropped to 60, then to 57 about 36 hours later, and rebounded to 91 the following morning, indicating ~1.5 days of measurable immune stress despite few symptoms. After the second dose the effects were milder: readiness dropped to 71 the next morning, he experienced a transient period of stress overnight (flattened HRV from ~12am–3am), and readiness rebounded to 85 the next day. Bland argues wearables can serve as useful self-assessment landmarks for immune response and resilience and to guide lifestyle and nutrition decisions.
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Well, hi there, Jeff, once again, so you recall that we're involved in this little collaborative experiment that I'm doing looking at the effect on my biometric devices of my Moderna vaccination. They already talked about the first time I went around showing that I had a very significant change in my readiness score in the morning after I got the vaccination. It went all the way down to 60. I'd never had any number, you know, in the 60s before over the two years of having worn my OURA ring. And when I looked at things like my pulse oximeter, my exercise tolerance on that, or my spirometry, they were both somewhat compromised based upon the impact that that vaccine had on my overall physiology, particularly my immune system. The next day, some 36 hours after, actually my readiness score on my OURA ring went down to 57, it was even lower. And then the following day, another 20, 24 hours later, the next morning, without changing anything, it went back up to 91. So it really showed that my body, for a period of the better part of a day and a half, was under some fairly significant immune stress, trying to respond to the vaccine, even though I personally didn't feel like I had a lot of symptoms. Well, now what happened the second time? Now I go back for my second vaccination and a lot of people have said, oh, that second one has really got more problems associated with symptoms than the first one. So I was kind of expecting that I might have a more significant decrement of function as I was being my immune system was being challenged. But turns out that in my particular case, that was not the case. It is true that my readiness score the morning after I had the vaccine went down, but it only went down to 71. It didn't go down to 60. But when I looked at it a little more detail, I found something interesting. And that is for a transient period of time during the evening where I was feeling a little bit like I was flushed. When I woke up in the evening, like at one o' clock in the morning, when I looked at my heart rate variability, you'll notice that it's really flat. During that period where I felt in the night when I was sleeping and woke up from my sleep, that I was under stress. So I had a period of, let's see, that would be from 12am to about 3am, where you could see that I was under stress, that my physiology was under stress. Then when I looked at the next day in terms of my heart rate variability, it was amazing to see that it came back and was much more normal. And my readiness score went back up to on that day to 85. So basically, the second vaccination didn't produce the same degree of change in my immune system demand on my body, but it was still measurable based on my biometrics. So this tells me that these little tools that we're using for self assessment become good kind of landmark tools for following our own response and resilience to specific things in our life. And we can learn a lot and we can pattern our lifestyle and behavior and nutrition to be focusing on immune function using these particular tools that are really available. So keep tuned. More the story as we continue.
