A Boston doctor suffered a serious allergic reaction to Moderna’s coronavirus vaccine, the first of its kind to be documented, a report said on Friday.
Dr. Hossein Sadrzadeh, a geriatric oncologist at the Boston Medical Center, got dizzy and felt his heart race minutes after receiving the vaccine on Thursday, he told The New York Times.
“It was the same anaphylactic reaction I experienced with seafood,” Sadrzadeh told the newspaper, noting that his tongue went numb, his blood pressure plummeted and he started to sweat cold.
“I don’t want anyone to go through this.”
Sadrzadeh self-administered an EpiPen he brought in the event of such a reaction, and was discharged after a brief examination in the emergency room, the report said.
Although some recipients of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine have reported allergic reactions to this inoculation – including a New York healthcare professional – Sadrzadeh’s symptoms mark the first known reaction of its severity to the Modern injection.
Vaccines, which have similar ingredients, require two injections given a few weeks apart.
Neither Moderna nor the Food and Drug Administration, which approved the vaccines, commented on the Times report.