That jab is not going to affect your sense of smell or taste either way.
Your Back Page scrawler is, by and large, a glass-half-full kind of a chap.
Every so often, however, our Pollyanna-ish sense of optimism does get tested – never more so than when we encounter the harebrained musings of the anti-vax brigade, which have become ever more rampant in our post-covid environment.
Luckily, there’s still enough proper scientists out there publishing the kind of credible findings we need for our mental equilibrium to be rebalanced.
One such piece of research is a study published this week from the University of Queensland’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience in the journal Laryngoscope Investigative Otolaryngology.
What this paper does is debunk the commonly held anti-vaxxer view that receiving a covid vaccination can exacerbate the sensory changes sometimes experienced by folks who have contracted the virus, in particular a loss or diminution of the sense of taste and smell.
The boffins also examined whether a covid jab might do the opposite, as in: help people who have experienced sensory loss due to covid infection to regain those faculties.
To test these ideas, the Queensland researchers conducted a survey of 1352 vaccinated participants from 52 countries between May 2022 and August 2023, with about half having reported changes to their smell and taste after contracting covid.
And what did they find? Well, despite the anecdotal evidence being cited by the anti-vaxxers and others, more than 90% of study participants reported that their smell and taste remained unchanged after their covid jab.
This is not to say that some people who contract covid do not experience changes to these sensory perceptions.
For example, a 2020 systematic review and meta-analysis of more than 38,000 people with the virus found an estimated 43% experienced smell dysfunction and 45% experienced taste dysfunction.
However, smell dysfunction became less common with later covid variants, with a 2023 study finding a global prevalence of just 3.7%. A 2025 review of studies examining persistent symptoms after covid, meanwhile, estimated that about 7% of participants experienced loss of smell three years after infection.
The key point is, people who may have suffered these effects from covid need not be concerned that getting a vaccination is going to exacerbate or prolong those symptoms. And, unfortunately, neither is the vaccination likely to improve them.
Study lead Dr Daniel Hwang told media that the findings could help clinicians “provide better information when counselling people with persistent post-covid smell and taste problems who have concerns about vaccination”.
Of course, those patients will have to be open to the concept of accepting actual evidence, as opposed to believing the hearsay and wilful misrepresentations that are the currency of social media, so we wouldn’t be getting our hopes up too high.
Sending story tips to Holly@medicalrepublic.com.au will help us sniff out a yarn.
