Covid Vaccine: British drug regulators recommended on Wednesday that people with severe allergic reactions to food and medicine not receive Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine after two health care workers, both with such a history, had a serious reaction.
The initial report on the British cases set off alarm and confusion, and left many people with allergies wondering whether the new vaccine would be safe for them.
Here’s what we know so far:
The workers both experienced anaphylaxis, a life-threatening reaction that impairs breathing and can drop blood pressure within minutes or even seconds after exposure to an allergen. Both workers were treated with epinephrine and have recovered, the regulators said.
People with a history of an anaphylactic reaction to any vaccine were excluded from Pfizer’s studies, company officials said on Thursday.
Among those who participated in the Pfizer trials, a very small number of people had allergic reactions. A document published by the F.D.A. on Tuesday said that 0.63 percent of participants who received the vaccine reported potential allergic reactions, compared with 0.51 percent of people who received a placebo.
In Pfizer’s late-stage clinical trial, one of the 18,801 participants who received the vaccine had an anaphylactic reaction, according to safety data published by the F.D.A. None in the placebo group did.
I have allergies, should I be concerned?
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading expert on infectious diseases, said on Wednesday that the allergic reactions were concerning but most likely rare, the kind of effects that show up when a vaccine moves out of testing and into broader distribution.
“If I were a person that had an underlying allergic tendency, I might want to be prepared that I might get a reaction, and therefore be ready to treat it,” Dr. Fauci said, in a webcast moderated by Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN, sponsored by Harvard and The New England Journal of Medicine.
Dr. Fauci acknowledged that the problem could turn out to affect a lot of people, but he said that other vaccines would eventually become available for those affected.
Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said the initial, broad recommendation in Britain mentioning severe allergic reactions seemed to be an overreaction that could needlessly scare many people away from a desperately needed vaccine in the middle of a raging pandemic.
Fewer than one in a million recipients of other vaccines a year in the United States have an anaphylactic reaction, Dr. Offit said. Those reactions are treatable and much easier to control than a severe case of Covid-19, he said.
— Denise Grady The New York Times