A Boston physician suffered a severe allergic reaction to Moderna’s coronavirus vaccine, the first of its kind documented, a report said Friday.
Dr. Hossein Sadrzadeh, a geriatric oncologist at Boston Medical Center, became dizzy and felt his heart beating minutes after receiving the vaccine on Thursday, he told The New York Times.
“It was the same anaphylactic reaction that I experience with crustaceans,” Dr. Sadrzadeh the newspaper, noting that his tongue went numb, his blood pressure plummeted and he broke a cold sweat.
“I don’t want anyone to go through that.”
Sadrzadeh himself administered an EpiPen that he brought with him in the event of such a reaction, and was fired after a brief emergency room examination, the report said.
Although a handful of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine recipients have reported allergic reactions to that vaccination – including a health worker in New York City – Sadrzadeh’s symptoms mark the first known reaction of its severity to the Moderna shot.
The vaccines, which contain similar ingredients, both require two injections a few weeks apart.
Neither Moderna nor the federal Food and Drug Administration, which approved the vaccines, commented on the Times report.