By: Melissa Blasius, May 24, 2024

Preexisting health conditions found to be a risk factor for developing vaccine-related tinnitus or hearing loss.

A newly published scientific study about the COVID-19 vaccine found people with certain preexisting medical conditions were more likely to report ringing in the ears after getting immunized.

A newly published scientific study about the COVID-19 vaccine found people with certain preexisting medical conditions were more likely to report ringing in the ears after getting immunized.

The authors of the study about these “risk factors” include Dr. Shaowen Bao, a University of Arizona professor, and Robert Edmonds, a COVID-19 vaccine patient from New Mexico.

“It’s very difficult when you have a very sudden event, and you’re trying to get answers, and there isn’t any,” Edmonds said.

Three years ago, Edmonds began a quest for health answers when he developed ringing in the ears shortly after getting his first COVID-19 vaccine shot in January 2021.

“It’s like the static of an old TV in the background,” Edmonds said. “But 10 times louder.”

ABC15 spent years tracking the concerns of thousands of people who reported they had ringing in the ears, known as tinnitus, vertigo or hearing loss after getting the COVID-19 vaccine.

Back then, tinnitus was not listed by the CDC or FDA as a potential side effect of any of COVID-19 vaccines. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which is no longer being used in the United States, later changed its labeling to include tinnitus as a potential side effect.

Edmonds felt public health leaders were not taking the tinnitus concerns seriously enough, so he turned to ABC15 with his story.

“You guys were really the first to kind of help with that,” Edmonds told ABC15 Senior Investigator Melissa Blasius.

ABC15 found more people across the country who also connected the onset of their tinnitus or hearing loss to the time they received a COVID-19 shot.

“The risk is small, but it seems to me that it is there,” said University of Arizona Assistant Professor Shaowen Bao. He is also a member of the scientific advisory committee for the American Tinnitus Association.

Bao and his team surveyed 398 people with complaints of COVID-19 vaccination-related tinnitus and studied 699,839 COVID-19 adverse event reports in the CDC’s VAERS database.

The Journal Frontiers in Pharmacology reviewed their findings and published them on May 21, 2024. Edmonds is listed as a coauthor.

“I’ve tried to work with as many legitimate scientists as possible and just get something to move forward,” Edmonds said.

Their findings suggest that “COVID-19 vaccination increases the risk of tinnitus, and metabolic disorders is a risk factor for COVID-19 vaccination-related tinnitus.”

Those findings include:

• Tinnitus report frequencies for Pfizer, Moderna and Janssen vaccines in VAERS are 47, 51 and 70 cases per million fully vaccinated people. 
• The symptom onset was often rapid after COVID-19 vaccination. 
• More women than men reported tinnitus and the sex difference increased with age 
• For 2-dose vaccines, the frequency of tinnitus was higher following the first dose than the second dose 
• For 2-dose vaccines, the chance of worsening tinnitus symptoms after a second dose was approximately 50% 
• Tinnitus was correlated with other neurological and psychiatric symptoms 
• Pre-existing metabolic syndromes were correlated with the severity of the reported tinnitus.  

The study also outlined the metabolic “risk factors,” saying older people with preexisting hypertension and obesity were most strongly correlated post-vaccine tinnitus. The study also notes diabetes as a risk factor.
“I wasn’t looking for vindication,” Edmonds said. “I was just looking for help getting other people who might be going through this.”

After years of trying to get the CDC and other public health leaders to hear his concerns, Edmonds hopes the Frontiers in Pharmacology article can be a catalyst.

“I would like to pass that torch off to someone to keep pushing this forward,” Edmonds said.

Currently, the CDC does not recognize tinnitus or hearing loss as a potential side effect of the currently used COVID-19 vaccines. According to the agency, ringing in the ears is common, and it can be expected some people would develop the condition around the same time as the COVID-19 shot without being caused by the vaccine.